Redshirting Kindergarten

It’s one of the reasons that visiting a Tools of the Mind classroom can cause moments of cognitive dissonance. While there’s a lot of dressing up and playing with blocks, plenty of messing around with sand tables and Legos and jigsaw puzzles, there are also a few activities that seem not just grown-up but protocorporate, borrowed directly from the modern office. Every morning, before embarking on the day’s make-believe play, each child takes a colored marker and a printed form called a play plan and draws or writes his declaration of intent for that day’s play: “I am going to drive the choo-choo train”; “I am going to make a sand castle”; “I am going to take the dollies to the beach.” At the beginning of prekindergarten, children are coached on dramatic play " called Make-Believe Play Practice " with the teacher leading the children, step by step, through the mechanics of pretending. (The training manual describes how a teacher might coach a child to feed a baby doll: “I’m pretending my baby is crying. Is yours? What should we say?”)

What other agency, company, group, organization, or team puts people together in one room for 6 hours per day BASED ON AGE?

What other agency, company, group, organization, or team puts people
together in one room for 6 hours per day BASED ON AGE?

Robert Fulghum listed life lessons in his 1986 best seller All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten. Among them were:

Clean up your own mess.

Don't take things that aren't yours.

Wash your hands before you eat.

Take a nap every afternoon.

Flush.

Were he to update the book to reflect the experience of today's children, he'd need to call it All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Preschool, as kindergarten has changed. The half-day devoted to fair play and nice manners officially began its demise in 1983, when the National Commission on Excellence in Education published "A Nation at Risk," warning that the country faced a "rising tide of mediocrity" unless we increased school achievement and expectations.

edit: the next paragraph, which I just read, makes the point more explicitly:

No Child Left Behind, in 2002, exacerbated the trend, pushing phonics and pattern-recognition worksheets even further down the learning chain. As a result, many parents, legislatures and teachers find the current curriculum too challenging for many older 4- and young 5-year-olds, which makes sense, because it's largely the same curriculum taught to first-graders less than a generation ago. Kindergartners are supposed to be able to not just read but also write two sentences by the end of the school year. It's no wonder that nationwide, teachers now report that 48 percent of incoming kindergartners have difficulty handling the demands of school.

Elizabeth Weil is a contributing writer for The New York Times Magazine, where a version of this article originally appeared.

I'm all for kindergarten going back to being kindergarten -- I think it's more developmentally appropriate.