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A few months ago, I heard an interview on NPR with Erika Christakis, a teacher and early childhood expert who, according to her bio, "has focused her career on the wellbeing of children and families." During the interview, Christakis discussed her new book, The Importance of Being Little: What Preschoolers Really Need From Grownups.
After getting it from the library, I read through it, and I'm so glad that I did, especially just before my oldest started kindergarten this fall.
Here are some direct quotes from the book that I find especially interesting:
Authentic Learning Experiences
...when adults replace real experiences with fake ones: children don't learn as much as they would from the real thing. (p. 182)
The transfer of early learning from home to institution has had incalculable benefits for the American workforce, and especially for professional women, but this massive social shift has left many parents feeling incompetent and overly dependent on so-called experts (such as this one) to guide them. Fear, inertia, and overconfidence in outside expertise has led parents to diminish, and even abrogate, their own abilities as a child's first, best teacher. (p. 84)
...it's not only the most disadvantaged children who are missing the chance to learn the equivalent of reading readiness by hanging out with adults in the grocery store. (p. 85)
If we are unwilling to make such a course correction [using homegrown learning experiences at home or at preschool], we'll continue to impose a stultified version of elementary school on children as young as three and four years old so they can be ready to learn on our narrowly defined terms. (p. 85)
The tactile art of preparing and clearing up meals was always part of the DNA of early childhood, but parents aren't cooking for their families anymore... (p. 181)
If they [parents] can't make progress shifting the culture in their children's classrooms, they should at the least liberate themselves while at home to have fun with their children, singing and reading and telling stories together and chatting about all the interesting, silly, enchanting stuff that goes on in a child's daily life. (p. 252)
Simple changes in a classroom or at home can make literacy learning so much more valuable. (p. 253)
Content
...simply a cultural practice that seems to make sense because it's the way we've always done things. (p. 46)
...what's the point of reciting the days of the week if you can't share something interesting you've done on one of those days? And let's not fool ourselves: these lower-level, stepping-stone skills such as shape recognition have more in common with pet tricks than high-level cognition. (p. 51)
The truth is that much of what passes for mathematics instruction in the early years actually has absolutely nothing to do with mathematics. (p. 94)
...Finland, whose three educational goals are stunningly fundamental: Promotion of personal well-being, Reinforcement of considerate behavior and action toward others, and Gradual buildup of autonomy" (p. 103)
...if Americans want an education system that prepares children only to make iPhones, or an education system that also prepares children to invent them. (p. 295)
Our obsession with outcomes has spawned an uncharitable devotion to cost-effectiveness analysis that prizes short-term, incremental improvements over the sort of long-term investments that yield our robots exploring the surface of Mars. And it values the quantifiable over the unseen. This special appeal to experts and authority figures to judge children's productivity stems from our fears, not from our observations of how children really grow. (p. 296)
When our young children become so unused to the magic of childhood that they lose the will to dawdle and dream, our society will be in serious trouble. (p. 299)
Screen Time
...'pseudo-ADHD,' a constellation of childhood behaviors that mimic ADHD but stem primarily from an 'environment-induced syndrome caused by too much time spent on electronic connections and not enough time spent on human connections.' (p. 118)
Complaining about excess screen time is like shooting fish in a barrel, but it's hard to mount a case that decorating virtual cupcakes on an iPad represents American childhood at its best. (p. 154)
...it's hard not to experience a sinking, Decline of the American Empire sort of feeling when watching a three-year-old glued to a pancake-maker app. (p. 181)
Capabilities of Preschoolers
It shouldn't surprise us that preschoolers are capable of boundless intellectual sophistication. The real surprise is that we subject them to testing and performance standards that often highlight the very dullest parts of their special minds. (p. 87)
...a kind of developmental amnesia among adults about what children are actually capable of doing in the preschool years. (p. 186)
Being a Kid
...we can model our appreciation for the intrinsic value of being a young child, even when it makes us anxious that our child might fall behind. Do we listen to children's ideas and give them space and time to enact their plans? (p. 110)
...after decades of research, the benefits of play are so thoroughgoing, so dispositive, so well described that the only remaining question is how so many sensible adults sat by and allowed the building blocks of development to become so diminished, (p. 144)
We have to understand that young children rarely like to be dragged to and fro, and they tend to do better with more, not less, in the way of routines and sleep. (p. 189)
...children have very demanding emotional lives, and we can be downright punishing about their needs. (p. 198)
We often assume that preschoolers' emotions are less powerful or less valid than our own grownup ones. (p. 198)
Learning Environment
The miracle of early learning is simply this: if we prepare a responsive learning environment, we won't have to break the educational objectives into bite-sized pieces; we can feed a child a whole meal. (p. 297)
The environment is the curriculum. Fix that, and we can leave young children to thrive. (p. 298)
...preschools are among the phoniest physical environments imaginable. (p. 186)
Relationships
...the most essential engine of child development is not gadgetry or testing but deep human connection. (p. 299)
Young children are important because they contain within themselves the ingredients for learning, in any place and at any time. Parents and teachers are important, too. And that's because they still control the one early learning environment that trumps all others: the relationship with the growing child. (p. 299)
