The daycare movement has recently redefined itself to be 'early learning' and I have a valued friend who knows something about early learning because she is a teacher in the public system right now and has been working with kids as a teacher for many years before having her own. I would humbly suggest you give this information some serious thought and reflection.I will be meeting with M.P. Beth Phinney at her constituency office on November 19th, at 11:00 a.m. to discuss how important childcare choice is for parents and the value of all the various ways childcare services ar delivered to our kids, like the value family members bring as caregivers to our children.
Respectfully,
Mark-Alan Whittle
SOME THOUGHTS ON EARLY LEARNING AND ON THE NUMBERS EXCUSE FOR SETTING UP UNIVERSAL DAYCARE
As a teacher I am very concerned that the new program is being called early learning and that the people taking care of the babies are being called ‘teachers’. I am especially concerned that they are claiming they are caregivers while parents are not.
I worked hard to get my education and professional teaching qualifications. A university degree is minimal and nowadays a masters in teaching is required – at least 5 years of university.
A daycare worker does not have that. They are not ‘teachers’.
The professions of law and medicine fiercely guard their professional designation and it is illegal to practice medicine or law without this license. We teachers should not be so willing to allow just anyone to claim they qualify. It degrades education.
Second, when the public hears the expression ‘early learning’ they envisage happy little children playing at centers of activity – sandbox, water centre, blocks, puzzles, playing house and dress up, doing some writing activities and generally ‘teaching themselves skills’ and interacting socially. That is in fact a vision of kindergarten, not of the age actually involved here.
The ‘early learning’ program is for babies. Imagine more realistically row upon row of cribs, row on row of high chairs, row on row of mats to nap on and of playpens. This is nearly industrial-style lineup of those so young they are not mobile on their own. It is sequencing in attending to individuals because an adult has to tend at least three simultaneously often many more, and the effect is that each gets only1/3 of the attention of the adult, reduced to possibly 1/8 of the adult’s time depending on staff ratios.
And the ‘skills’ we are talking about are not adding, reading or taking turns. We are talking about learning to use a cup, learning to crawl, taking those first tentative steps, learning to use a spoon.
These skills are intensely one-on-one and they are not optimally acquired when the baby is not getting much adult time.
We are talking not about learning to read, but about learning to talk and studies show that language deficits are turning up after long exposure to daycare. Kids are surrounded by role models of babbling and not role models of adult speech. There is a lack of real communication- of meaningful question, answer, statement, reply feedback simply because the adult is too busy.
So we see also a lack of learning. The hundreds of questions of the two year old, his own idiosyncratic way to understand the world, go unresponded to most of the time – and so he learns not to ask, or that there are no answers. And his focus goes from trying to understand the world, to play, to thinking peer group is what matters. We see a ‘dumbing down’ of learning.
Even when the child is ages 4-5 we could actually question the ‘early learning’ claim of large group settings. For some it is an improvement, if for instance the home is a drug-production centre and full of neglect but the vast majority of homes are not like that. Most parents go to some trouble to ensure their child does have toys, and good food, and play time and playmates. And given that this is a real focus of parents, it is odd to have a government assume we are negligent in this area so seriously that we all need to be replaced. For me the suggestion that only in a daycare setting will children learn academic school-like skills is also misleading and wrong.
As a frequent teacher in kindergartens lately, I have seen the pluses and minuses of even that level of mass-instruction. There is very little actual teaching of reading. To teach a child to read takes intense daily exposure to basic concepts about the shapes of each letter, the sounds they make, the variant sounds they make in other situations and the slow and gentle development of the ability to sound out words. I know of no kindergarten that actually even tries to teach kids to do this in a logical way. Most just have kids learn to print the letters, to memorize words and to chant them back, and to memorize short books to give the illusion of reading. A few children figure out the system but I would say nearly half do not. So grade one teachers are faced with 30 children most of whom cannot read and yet the pressure is intense to get those children reading by December. The kindergarten did not teach the skill. The same can be said for math. Kindergarten gives some exposure to several concepts – weather, seasons, stages of animal development, holidays, and outside observers may feel this is very cute and essential basic learning which it is – but it also happens as well at home. At home parents take the child on walks through the autumn leaves and make rubbings of them. They answer their questions about why the road goes both ways and they do science experiments at a level the kindergarten cannot such as making cookies, gardening, building a snowman.
It is not an either or and kindergarten can parallel or supplement what the home is doing but it is very misleading to claim it is an improvement on the home. Most kindergartens have equipment in ‘pretend’ (fridges, stoves,) that homes have in ‘real’. Why would we value only the substitute?
The public may have this happy thought that kids are learning to take turns and share and happily bond with playmates. But in large groupings with a harried adult, they are really learning to listen when the adult calls out, to sit still, to sit down, to wait, to stop and mainly to be quieter. The noise level is high and they are unable to hear much of the meaningful message of the adult without being constantly reminded to be quiet. So this is not so much learning as crowd control. And as for sharing, the child is learning to take turns but only the same way he or she would learn at home with siblings or at any park with friends.
The good parts of the ‘socialization’ are to enjoy friends but there is a real downside. Kids are learning that the loudest gets the most of the adult’s time, so they are learning to call for attention. Some learn to manipulate the situation by being ‘cute’ and affectionate, even to strangers, while others get attention by being loud. Many clamor not just for the attention of the adult, who is busy, but also for the attention and approval and laughter of the group, so their antics are meant for peer audiences. So there is gamesmanship and strategizing with kids often too shy to win. We get then cliques, best friends and those who are left out, and in the end bullies and victims. The increased incidence we see in the regular schools of serious misbehavior problems, desperate attention seeking, and bullying is directly related to the lack of one-on-one loving attention children are getting in the preschool years. They are crying for help, by these antics. And yet some misguidedly said the child would do well in such group settings and be ‘socialized’. It is a negative socialization sometimes.
The irony of the ‘learning centres’ approach of kindergarten too is that little kids have very short attention spans. The 6-7 centres the teacher sets up are interesting for a few days and then frankly, the kids have been there, done that. They want to move on. But the centre will be there for the whole year.
Kids want a variety that a single building cannot provide. They need to get out to see the world, to go to museums and parks, not just one fenced playground day after day after day. They need to see airports and city hall and the subway system, during their waking hours, during their ‘prime learning’ hours. And daycares have them for those hours but do not have the staff or resources to really offer these learning sites. The kids are bored and bored kids get restless and hard to ‘control’. Daycare workers have a fast turnover because even the daycare worker does not like to stay in the environment. How can we imagine kids like it?
It is ironic to see a culture that values the outdoors and exercise, that thinks little kids are happy to be cooped up. The required ‘daylight’ time kids are supposed to have in a daycare is sometimes reduced because in the summer the sun is too bright, so the kids get even less time breathing fresh air and examining nature. Yet we call this building a ‘learning ‘ environment.
Third – we know even in the regular school system that a child spends about 12,000 hours in class in K-12 and 88.000 hours outside of school. We know that learning happens in many locations not just within our hallowed halls and we urge parents to partner with us to ensure the child reads at home, does homework, is exposed to educational settings like museums and libraries on a regular basis. We know that ‘education’ is a very broad thing and we do not claim we own it.
The same however is not realized by daycare lobbyists who seem to say that only in their little buildings do children learn at all. This highly deceptive claim is however a pressure to mislead the public into thinking if you don’t buy into their one style of child-care, you are against any learning of the very young.
Fourth, because we focus on a balance between career and family in most professions now, we realize that it is unhealthy to spend all your time at the office. Lawyers, dentists, clerks, everybody claims, justifiably, the right to family time. And yet, if we permit this for all others, we also have to permit it for daycare workers. And that being the case, we know that daycare workers like any other worker, want to go home at the dot of five, at the closing hour, at the end of the shift. Whatever the problem, they do not want to give that extra bit, go that extra mile. Their commitment to the children there is a paid commitment and it may be loving as much as they can muster for strangers, but they do want a life outside it. This level of dedication is far less than the level of dedication of the parent. The parent will go that extra mile, lose all of a night’s sleep to tend a sick child and drive across the city in a blizzard just to get the medicine. We are deluding ourselves if we think that daycare workers are an improvement on parents. They are substitutes for parents. And if we value the substitute and we should, we should at least value the original- the parent, as much. The daycare legislation funds only the substitute, which is simply illogical.
Fifth, Mr. Dryden keeps saying that ‘the reality is that now 70% of women work’. Besides the obvious slight against all those who are home with the kids as not ‘working’, which is itself a sexist remark, and besides the fact that the 70% number is a misrepresentation since at least 35% of women earn but while the child is with a family member. Let us look at the 30% of women Dryden admits are still home with the child.
These women are a huge number. Why would he feel comfortable ignoring them? This government massively funds the first nations people who are under 10% of the population. We give a lot of money to support fair legislation for gays and yet gays are only 1% of the population. We fund cures for breast cancer that affect only 100 of every 100,000 people. Why is it fair to attend to these much much smaller groups, but to ignore one third of the nation’s women?
The irony then of the ‘early learning’ claim is that clearly this is not optimal learning, and the main focus is not really the best level of education of the child at all. If it were it would give private tutors for each child and small groupings of about 3-5 kids maximum for all of the preschool years. The focus is obviously to give children somewhere to be that has some toys in it, while the parent is doing what the state really values, earning and paying tax.
The ‘early learning’ claim is an intentionally deceptive one.
I have great trust in the public. Once empowered, with time and money, parents nearly universally know how to be good parents, and want to be and try to be. Even with limited resources most parents bend over backwards to provide the best for their kids. Even parents from troubled backgrounds want to ensure their kids have it better than they did.
So why do we have a social policy that says parents can’t be trusted, that they should get no funding and that only the state know how to teach the kids?
It is not only insulting and undemocratic to mistrust the public. Education-wise it is an academically false claim. Daycares are not better early learning environments than the home.
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