28 Comments

Neoteny, —the human extension of childhood's playfulness & curiosity responsible for our highest cultural artifacts is crushed by the factory (regime) school system that only cares about producing indoctrinated cannon-fodder for mass levees.

Parents have to reclaim their children and fold them into the heart of the family, where love can nurture growth. And, when children, if ever, go off to “school”, —what sort of madras will they attend?

Hopefully one that fosters humanity or will take the whole school and escape despotic rule. Here are two examples:

1. On the first day of the new school year, all the teachers in one private school received the following note from their principal:

Dear Teacher,
 I am a survivor of a concentration camp. My eyes saw what no man should witness:
 Gas chambers built by learned engineers.
 Children poisoned by educated physicians.
 Infants killed by trained nurses.
 Women and babies shot and burned by high school and college graduates.
 So I am suspicious of education.
 My request is: Help your students become human. Your efforts must never produce learned monsters, skilled psychopaths, educated Eichmanns.
 Reading, writing and arithmetic are important only if they serve to make our children more humane.”

Haim G Ginott (1972) Teacher and Child, 317

2. “After nearly 20 years in America, she [Anna Essinger] returned to Germany after the First World War, and in 1926 she opened a school of her own. Landschulheim Herrlingen, located near Ulm, did away with the traditional German approach to education, which was based on strict discipline and harsh punishments. Instead, the progressive, non-denominational boarding school put each child at the center of his or her education, encouraging their natural curiosity and creativity. Anna often quoted the English writer and philosopher John Ruskin: “The entire object of true education is to make people not merely industrious, but to love industry, not merely learned, but to love knowledge, not merely pure, but to love purity, not merely just, but to hunger and thirst after justice.” As much emphasis was placed on learning practical skills as on academic achievement, and children contributed to the community as they might at home, tending the garden, cooking, cleaning.” —Deborah Cadbury (12 July 2022) The Schoolteacher Who Saved Her Students From the Nazis: A new book explores the life of Anna Essinger, who led an entire school’s daring escape from Germany in 1933, Smithsonian Magazine, https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/the-schoolteacher-who-spirited-her-students-away-from-the-nazis-180980393/

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Well-said

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Thank you for this comment.

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May 10Liked by Peter Gray

I've been teaching high school Early Child Development for 17 years. Before that, I was a stay at home mother of 6. This study makes so much sense, as I'm now seeing so many kids with SocEmot problems and/or on IEP or 504 (which have increased dramatically) . Moreover, many can't write a proper sentence or essay, are reading below grade level, score poorly in math - yet our honor roll has loads of kids on it. We are burying our heads in the sand. What we're doing in the early years flies in the face of what we know is proper development for children, and I still teach that play is children's work. Play also is a joy for children, and we are cancelling that joy , so it's no wonder children are angry- it's horrible. But that's bureaucracy - forcing good teachers to do what they know isn't right, or else forfeit your job. We must start initiating change at the school board level. Thank you for bringing this study to light - it's great ammunition.

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I don't have experience with early childhood "education." I read "Better late than early," before I began educating my children at home, so I wasn't in a hurry. I taught my first child to read when she was seven because that was when she was getting antsy and bored enough. By that time she could draw better than most adults, and was adept at mental math and storytelling. She learned how to read in about 2 months, going from knowing the alphabet and the letter sounds to reading "James and the Giant peach." We weren't sure if she had actually understood the book, so we asked her what it was about. She didn't want to at first, and then began "James was a boy who lived by the sea," and proceeded to give a summary that would put most 7th graders to shame.

Since then pennsylvania, the state where I live, has made it mandatory to begin schooling at age 6. I don't think it's working as well for my young son. I think I need to do some thinking about how to make his education more play based.

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Thank you for this story. On average, kids brains are not ready to learn to read until age 7. When kids wait, they learn very quickly because their brain has myelinated enough to learn the concepts needed. Your child is case in point! No rush to push these things on kids until they're brains are ready.

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Thwnk you ! I'm going to get this book.

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Peter, I am so thankful that I found your substack! I have been an educator for over 25 years and as an SLP, I support social skill development. Play is essential for social skill development and sadly kids are being robbed of much needed play when they are young. I have witnessed first hand the push for academics in younger grades and believe it started with No Child Left Behind in 2002, with the introduction of high stakes testing. Common Core just pushed it even more. Forcing kids to learn a skill before they are ready only causes stress and anxiety, not a love of learning. I briefly read a summary of the study you mentioned and sadly it seems what the researchers found was that kids need even more academic rather than less. I am sure the greedy EdTech platforms are ready with their supposed "High Quality" instructional materials that these young children must need in order to learn! Your wisdom and knowledge has inspired me to advocate even more for what I know children truly need, thank you!

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So true!

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May 10Liked by Peter Gray

I’m hearing a lot (and because of you, being wary of) play-based learning as a superior tactic for teaching young kids. But I’m nervous that play with a point isn’t actually play. It’s trying to be productive, using play as a means to an end. Is play-based learning conferring benefit or harm?

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author

I agree. Often what is called "play based learning" is a perversion of play.

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As someone who's worked in early childhood settings. It's open-ended, undirected play. The children are free to explore where they want and what interests them.

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Agree totally with the need for play based learning and sincerely value the time and energy you have spent to be able to so generously share this information.

Incidentally, I believe even as adults, we need play based learning.

In my own case, I love to learn, but like a rebellious bored child, if it’s not fun, I won’t do it. :-)

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Thank you, Peter. I deeply appreciate your in depth approach to all subjects about education. My four year old grandson thanks you too.

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I am a sub teacher now after a long k teacher career and I am finding the classrooms I go into are more structured academically than they ever have been!

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Firstly, I have to do some throat clearing and say that I support the play-based model for early education and find the research very convincing. But in the spirit of improving arguments, etc., I do want to mention that Siegfried Engelmann (originator of DI) does cover the Ypsilanti study in his book, Teaching Needy Kids in Our Backward System. Compared to the other groups, the kids in the DI group were disproportionately male. At the risk of getting yelled at, being a male is more highly correlated with getting in trouble with the law than being female. Further, there were only 15 children in the DI group in this study. Engelmann writes that they only received 30 minutes a day of DI instruction for language and that it was in oral language, not worksheets and tests. With such small numbers (15 students), and a lack of controls (more males) and the short amount of DI instruction (30 minutes a day) it seems a little tenuous to draw a conclusion between one (possibly bad!) preschool program and life outcomes measured more than a decade later.

Many people in the early childhood education space want to believe that high-quality ECE is like a jacket we can put on kids to protect them from bad outcomes. Studies like the one from Tennessee make us confront the fact that interventions have positive, neutral, and sometimes WORSE outcomes. Life would be easier for policymakers and educators if that third one were not an option.

If I had to make a hypothesis to test, it would not be that specific programs are bad for young children because they are too academic. Rather, it would be that children need a certain amount of time in free play with other children in order to develop the emotional regulation, problem-solving, resilience, self-confidence, cooperation, etc., that serve them later in life. Academic preschool just sucks up time for other things. It just seems a bit grandiose to suggest that there is a straight line between a crappy preschool and getting in trouble with the law. My guess it is more of an opportunity cost issue.

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Very good points.

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We took our children out of Uk state school and into a Steiner School which continues play and story based learning until aged 7. Children thrived from that point, emotionally and academically

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I think that this study shows not that academic pre K is bad , but that having young children remain at home with their primary caregiver is the best option for longer tern learning, development, and behavior. There are other studies that support this concept.

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Peter, thank you as always for an interesting, well-researched, and important read. I didn't go to preschool, but I remember loving kindergarten (just before Common Core, thank goodness). My kindergarten experience definitely included academics, but it was always framed in the context of a game or artistic project or something like that, and there was plenty of time for actual play. Reading this article, and reflecting on my own memories, makes me sad for so many kids who have had to, and continue to have to, endure this kind of education. It's mindboggling to me that a system so obsessed with data (in the form of testing scores) would not care to find or generate high-quality data to guide their academic approach.

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Thank you for this article and others you have researched and written. As a 30 year veteran of early elementary education, I will be keeping this article for reference. I have been teaching Transitional Kindergarten, TK, in California since its inception as a grade level 14 years ago. At the beginning of TK, there was little direction or support from my school district. I have had to learn and seek out resources on my own. Now that TK has expanded in California there is more funding and focus on the grade level, and yet, there are many administrators that want TK to look like an academic Kindergarten. It is gut wrenching when I hear this because I have seen the benefit of true play- based TK,( and I don’t believe my classroom is fully play-based yet). When TK started in California, we were told that the state would be keeping track of students from TK in order to record their academic progress and in turn, record the benefits of the early childhood grade level. I am unaware if this has been happening. Several of my students from my first TK class will be juniors in HS in the next school year and they are successful academically and seem to be navigating the HS social scene somewhat successfully. Others from the same inaugural TK class have not fared as well.

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My question is why don't school districts believe these types of results and tend to fall back on the " academic" side of things?

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What gets measured gets done and it's easy to measure test results.

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Sep 28·edited Sep 28

Great article.

It reminds me a lot of the book Hunt Gather Parent, we need to let kids be a bit more and then invite them to watch and learn from us as they are interested. My daughter thrived in her play-based nature preschool.

It’s also good to hear that low income kids need play just as much. I sometimes worried that maybe there was an argument that they need “catch up” but it definitely looks like that’s not true.

I taught special Ed to low income students with learning disabilities for a year. There were some of them with true disabilities that just needed extra reading/math support, but looking back, for some of them I wonder if we should’ve just used their special Ed time to let them have more play and self-driven exploration, as they seemed to me to not have any context or schema to put any academic info into, and I felt bad that they made very little progress all year.

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How about the Effective Provision of Preschool Education Brittish long term study or the Australian E4kids longitudinal study also show the negative impacts of early academic emphasis. There is so much research that proves the long term benifits of high quality early education with a play based intentional focus.

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