“It’s all listening. There’s no playing,” he said, his still-wet cheeks reflecting the lamplight.
Just three months earlier, Griffen had been a joyful preschooler pretending to be a seed growing into a tree. Now instead of sand tables and circle time, he got work sheets and instructional time. Instead of play, he got pressure.
“I think that’s what school is for. It’s for sitting and learning,” another mother told me with a confident nod, the powerful lobby of common sense on her side. But the “tyranny of common sense,” as education reformer Ken Robinson once called it, has a short memory. As little as 15 years ago, most kindergarten classrooms were play-based. Many educators and researchers still believe that is how young children learn best.
Finland delays formal reading instruction until children reach age 7, but the country consistently comes out at the top of international assessments. Japan’s infamously rigorous schools remain play-based until about second grade. Recently, China has made sweeping reforms to break away from rote learning.
But American politicians, who seem to think that assessment of progress is the same as progress, insist on linking federal funding to standardized tests. President Obama’s inflated promises of education reform have effervesced into even more bubbles to fill in on standardized tests, while Race to the Top pushes for teachers to be evaluated by their students’ scores. It looks as if test prep hysteria will consume our classrooms for years to come.
