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Recently, a father wrote to the parenting advice column for Slate. He said the following:
“Our 5-year-old son recently started kindergarten. Every Wednesday, he gets a homework packet. The packet contains four or five pages, front and back, which he has to complete by the following Wednesday. In addition, he has lists of words and word sounds he’s supposed to practice at home, as well as short books he’s supposed to read. Frankly, it’s a lot for a 5-year-old, and it’s causing him anxiety. The problem is, my wife insists he complete as much of the work as possible every night. Some nights, he spends two to three hours on schoolwork, only leaving the table to shower. Granted, he gets distracted during this time (he’s 5), and has outbursts because he’s “bored” or just tired, so he’s not actually studying for three hours straight.
But he’s also not playing or coloring or riding his bike or just being a kid. He’s just sitting there, thinking about schoolwork. This morning, my wife insisted he study vocabulary before school, as we were all rushing to get ready, even though he spent all of last night on homework. As if five minutes of practice on the way out the door would do him any good. (He actually asked to go to school just to get out of it.) I know this pressure from her is coming from a good place, wanting him to succeed and understand the importance of hard work. But maybe because I suffer from anxiety myself and understand how pressure contributes to that, I worry about his mental and emotional health. (As a side note, our differing views on this is causing tension in our marriage as well.) Am I wrong to insist on a bit more balance between work and play?”
This clearly has a large amount of people up in arms, and I don’t blame them. This kid is five years old, and he’s spending three hours on homework a night? Whatever happened to “time to be a kid.”
Well, if you look throughout history, “time to be a kid” didn’t really exist. A century ago, children his age would be working in the factories from 5 A.M. to 10 P.M. A century before then, the kids would be working on the family farm.
This is not me saying we should return to this system, quite the opposite, in fact. It’s an amazing thing that the youngest members of the nation have time to be innocent, fun-loving, and adventitious. However, it seems people commonly forget that the notion of an independent childhood is a fairly recent one in human history. Up until just a number of centuries ago, you didn’t even name your child until he was three or four because you didn’t want to grow attached to it.
However, why is our public-school system like this? The answer isn’t because of people not following the old ways, as some have suggested. It’s because they’re following them too well.
Our current public system was created at a time where you either worked on a farm or in a factory. Today, both those industries are shrinking more and more.
The rigid bell system of the public-school system was created to emulate the experience of working in a factory. These days, schools are scared to death of being told children will get dead-end jobs.
Why do students get the summer off? Because children use to be needed during the summers to work on the farms. It was never a vacation in any meaningful sense.
Sitting still for hours on end was necessary for working on both factories and farms, but it’s not needed in modern society. This is why the push against children with ADHD is actually quite dangerous for societal progress. Multitasking and having multiple skills in many areas is actually quite important for the modern economy.
So, what do you do when this system is failing? Well, most of these people were educated in schools that discouraged creative. What do you think they did?
This is the issue with the standardized testing model. No Child Left Behind made it so children had to take giant tests, which made it much easier for them to be left behind. Sitting still is no longer the most important thing for succeeding in life, and our public-school system fails to keep this in mind because it’s unable to.
While local control of education is a good start to fixing this, school choice is clearly the best way to figure this out. Under a school choice system, we can try new education models, and parents will get the chance to pick which one works, not just for them but for the child. Many private and charter schools are trying out new ways of learning, and a number of them have had great success.
Until we get school choice, you might as well just throw your kid in the factory.
Ephrom Josine is a libertarian political blogger/commentator, and a frequent contributor to The Liberty Hawk. You can find him on Twitter @EphromJosine1, writing near-daily on Medium @ephromjosine or weekly on Freedom First Blog.
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Editor’s Note: Expecting there to be “time to be a kid” may be a modern notion, but I think there’s a point to be made that never in the history of mankind has the experience of a society’s youth so largely consisted of sedentary instruction. Previous centuries may have had greater expectations upon children to work and earn their keep, but the facts of biology are that children are bundles of energy and are naturally at home engaging in energetic endeavors, whether work or play. If America ever fully embraces a system of school choice, I would not doubt that the most effective instruction to develop would allow for more frequent invigorating, unstructured break periods where children can expend their energy and develop physical skills as well as far more hands-on instruction. My issue with the many, many hours of school under the current model, with the multiple hours of homework on top of the hours at school, and with the proposals to extend the school day have less to do with “time to be a kid” and more to do with “time to not be zombies.” -Justin
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