One of the significant changes in education over the past 20 years has been the transformation of preschool and kindergarten rooms from a child’s joyful, creative play area into mini-first-grade classrooms full of lessons and worksheets. Some government agencies around the world have even ruled that this is mandatory for young children and will help them with their academic work and their overall growth and development. In the 90s, early education was so popular that it even entered the “baby realm” in the form of Baby Einstein videos and black-and-white-themed toys designed to stimulate babies. However, the myth of “early education” is increasingly being challenged. Ironically, it was Einstein who said, “If you want a child to be intelligent, tell him fairytales. If you want him to be more intelligent, tell him more fairytales.”
One researcher, David Elkind, even wrote an entire book on the subject. In his book, The Hurried Child, Elkind, a child psychologist and professor at Tufts University, discusses the problem of stress that he finds in children who come to him for treatment. He points out that, in the great rush to bring children into academic work, we have ceased to ask whether children are inwardly ready for such concentrated, intellectually oriented work.
The clearest example of such research that has come to our attention is a major study undertaken in Germany comparing 100 public school classes for five-year-olds. Fifty of them had only play in their program, and the other 50 had academics and play together. The children entered first grade at age six, and the study followed their progress until they were ten. The first year, there was little difference to be seen. By the time the children were ten, however, those who had been allowed to play when they were five surpassed their schoolmates in every area measured. One can imagine how startling these results were to the state educators.
The basic reason that children are not ready for early education is that they are not physically, emotionally, and spiritually prepared. They may be ready in one of those areas – but not all of them. A child has natural developmental stages. When we interfere with this process by starting children on early academic subjects and methods of learning, their imagination may not fully develop, and imagination is the basis of all intelligence.
When we follow the natural rhythms of the child, they are better able to grasp and retain information they are given, and the educational experience becomes a natural flow of their life. When we impose an unnatural rhythm on the child, education can become a challenge and/or a task for the teacher and child.
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