How the New Preschool Is Crushing Kids

Today’s young children are working more, but learning less.

- Erika Christakis

Step into an American preschool classroom today and you are likely to be bom­barded with what we educa­tors call a print­-rich environment, every surface festooned with alphabet charts, bar graphs, word walls, instructional posters, classroom rules, calendars, schedules, and motivational platitudes - few of which a 4­-year-­old can “decode,” the contemporary word for what used to be known as reading.

Because so few adults can remem­ber the pertinent details of their own preschool or kindergarten years, it can be hard to appreciate just how much the early­-education landscape has been transformed over the past two decades. The changes are not restricted to the confusing pastiche on classroom walls. Pedagogy and curricula have changed too, most recently in response to the Common Core State Standards Initia­tive’s kindergarten guidelines. Much greater portions of the day are now spent on what’s called “seat work” (a term that probably doesn’t need any exposition) and a form of tightly scripted teaching known as direct instruction, formerly used mainly in the older grades, in which a teacher carefully controls the content and pacing of what a child is supposed to learn.