The time has come to do away with preschools and turn them into Early Childhood Centres. Integrating preschool education with training for pregnant mothers on child birth, rearing, brain development and child development can do wonders argues.
Toddlers as young as two years are made to hold pencils and go over dotted lines in worksheets. Three year olds are made to recite rhymes in front of a class and then graded and marked on their ‘performance’. Children are taught number 1 and then number 7, skipping the rest in between reason given: standing line numbers should be taught together! Completely overlooking the fact that letters need not be taught in the A to Z format but numbers need to be taught in the order of counting else children will not have a foundational base of what number comes before, after. This is the confused state of preschool curriculum.
Examples given above are just a few examples of the atrocious way in which children are taught in preschools. If you ask the preschools they blame it on parents, it’s the parents that want their child to read and write at an early age. To what gain? What do we achieve when we push children towards this senseless method of ‘education’ when they should be learning with play? Are we scoring on the PISA results? Not at all.
Sample this: Finland that has no formal learning for children up to the age of 7 is scoring better than all countries. So we have school heads flocking to visit schools in Helsinki, but is there any change in the way we teach our preschoolers? Absolutely not, it is the heads of schools that feel that preschoolers should be given more reading and writing!
It is time to give up our traditional mindsets on how preschoolers should be taught. What is to be taught and how much is something that needs immediate attention. Exploration through play is needed. The malaise that is all around is the craze to get kids behind desks and teachers who can ‘discipline’ them. As a result, preschools have turned into ‘entrance exam centres’ for primary schools, where the kids are only ‘prepared’ to learn how to cope in standard one.
This story is from the December 2016 edition of Brainfeed.
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This story is from the December 2016 edition of Brainfeed.
Start your 7-day Magzter GOLD free trial to access thousands of curated premium stories, and 9,000+ magazines and newspapers.
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