Perspective: For Silicon Valley pre-k students, play’s the thing—not worksheets
In a Freedom to Learn Substack post, psychologist Peter Gray argues that pushing local four- and five-year-olds into desk work doesn’t boost long-term achievement; rather, it hurts it. That’s a timely caution for Silicon Valley parents and lawmakers championing California’s universal TK (Transitional Kindergarten) roll-out.
“Today, we have much more evidence of long-term harm of early academic training than the Germans had in the 1970s, yet we persist in such training in almost every public kindergarten in the country.”
“The Tennessee Pre-K Study…By 6th grade, the control group—kids who didn’t get the pre-K ‘boost’—outscored pre-K graduates on every reading, math, and science test. The pre-K group was also 74 percent more likely to be diagnosed with a learning disorder and nearly 50 percent more likely to face major behavioral offenses at school.”
“Four-year-olds need lots of time to play, create, socialize, take initiative, figure things out on their own, and learn to manage themselves. The time spent in academic training is time that they cannot spend on learning the much more important skills that come from self-directed activities.”
Another possibility is that the early academic training results in shallow learning of the skills; sufficient to pass the pre-K and kindergarten tests but which interferes with subsequent deeper learning.
“Regardless of the mechanism, it is now abundantly clear that we should stop even thinking about teaching academics to tots. We should finally make the decision that the Germans made half a century ago and stop formal academic training for children below age 6.”
Read the whole thing here.
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