This week I published an article about reforming education in America. Indeed, I could not write only one article about this; Education in America needs a bigger overhaul than most people think. I’m going to attempt to break down my opinions on what needs to be reformed in a series of posts roughly following the education track in the United States. In other words, I’m going to devote an article to Preschool, Elementary School, Middle/Jr. High School, High School, College, and beyond. Then, possibly, I’ll devote a few articles to wrapping up the series with broader views that didn’t fit anywhere inside the other articles. Hopefully this will allow me to clearly and concisely explain my opinions and allow the readers to follow it easily. As I’ve explained in the previous article, education must start at home. This cannot be open for discussion. Parents need to take charge and teach their children the basic fundamentals of life. Children have the vast capability to learn. Everything they see and hear are new. They soak up knowledge like a sponge. It is the child’s parents who must take the responsibility to cultivate their minds and teach them how to use their bodies.
This is where preschool, or pre-kindergarten depending on how your community terms it, comes in. In the United States, most pre-K programs help bridge the gap between “school” being all playtime and showing the kids school is a place to learn. This is an important bridge, as while children can be very adaptive, it can be a shock if they go into Kindergarten (usually the first statutory grade in the United States) thinking its going to be like every other place they’ve gone to play. In the US, preschool is not mandatory. Its available to those parents who wish to utilize it, and these days with most parents working day jobs, its an important institution that provides both an educational experience and childcare.
Still, preschool can only help a child so much. It’s still up to the parents to instill core values and education into their children as soon as they are physically and mentally able to handle that sort of input. Yet, parents still require the right tools to help teach their children. As a first step in the reformation, a blueprint for preschool education should be decided upon by the leaders in the preschool and pre-Kindergarten circles. If parents are able to understand what their children need to learn before attending a preschool course, their children will be a lot better prepared for the beginning of their education journey.
While preschooling is not nationally mandated like primary and secondary school, President Obama wants to make sure preschool is universally available and well maintained. The hope is that once a national preschool framework is established, more parents will be able to enroll their children in preschool education, and yet still maintain their parental responsibilities of playtime, learning, and growth.
With a nationally mandated framework comes a method of grading preschool institutions. Currently a preschool can be licensed as a childcare provider, but what is really needed is a dual-license system, where a preschool must be licensed for childcare and early childhood education. These people will be teaching our future, they need to be accountable. Some states don’t even require a preschool teacher even have any form of academic degree. Luckily there are national associations to look to. The National Association for the Education of Young Children provides an accreditation for preschool programs.
As the quality of the teachers increases, their pay must also increase proportionally. Keeping teacher salaries on par with their performance and providing a merit system for salary increases will keep teachers learning so they can better service the children in this important time in their lives. This will keep the required talent within the education system, drawing on the parallel that those AIG executives have been talking about: paying for the talent at market value or more to keep them there. Except these teachers aren’t getting million-dollar bonuses; they make less than $30,000 a year for a job that should be treated more importantly than it really is.
Now, while I’ve likened preschool to a bridge between being a toddler and starting proper schooling, that doesn’t mean it has to be totally academic. Social interaction and physical interaction need to be emphasized just as much as academic achievement. The monotone voice of Ben Stein in Ferris Bueller’s day off has no place in a preschool environment. Laughing, playing, getting dirty, learning to share, learning to count, learning new words and concepts. Those should be the pillars of a preschool education. And for the most part, preschools succeed in this venture.
As a summary, preschool reform should take the following shape:
- Increase teacher pay by increasing requirements of those people who will teach our children
- Increase funding from various sources to give teachers the tools they need to provide a positive experience for our children
- Require accreditation of preschool facilities from both a childcare and educational standpoint.
- Empower parents with tools that will allow them to continue child development at home, reinforcing the social, physical, and academic lessons learned in preschool.
Short of funnelling preschool into the statutory education in the US and putting it under the umbrella of formalized state education, a few tweaks to the current system here and there can have some profound improvements in our children’s lives.
Please take the time to read the previous article on Reforming Education in America to see the topic that sparked this entire discussion. Parents, please leave a comment about positive or negative experiences you’ve had with a preschool environment. And don’t forget to subscribe to the RSS feed to get updates when the next article, Primary Education, gets published.
