A bold challenge to the conventional wisdom
about early childhood, with a pragmatic program to encourage parents and
teachers to rethink how and where young children learn best by taking the
child's eye view of the learning environment
Parents of young children today are embattled:
Pick the "wrong" preschool and your child won't get into the
"right" college. But our fears are misplaced, according to Yale early
childhood expert Erika Christakis. Children are powerful and inventive; and the
tools to reimagine their learning environment are right in front of our eyes.
Children are hardwired to learn in any setting,
but they don't get the support they need when "learning" is defined
by strict lessons and dodgy metrics that devalue children's intelligence while
placing unfit requirements on their developing brains. We have confused
schooling with learning, and we have altered the very habitat young children
occupy. The race for successful outcomes has blinded us to how young children
actually process the world, acquire skills, and grow, says Christakis, who
powerfully defends the preschool years as a life stage of inherent value and
not merely as preparation for a demanding or uncertain future.
In her path-breaking book, Christakis explores
what it's like to be a young child in America today, in a world designed by and
for adults. With school-testing mandates run amok, playfulness squeezed, and
young children increasingly pathologized for old-fashioned behaviors like
daydreaming and clumsiness, it's easy to miss what's important about the crucial
years of three to six, and the kind of guidance preschoolers really need.
Christakis provides a forensic and far-reaching analysis of today's whole
system of early learning, exploring pedagogy, history, science, policy, and
politics. She also offers a wealth of proven strategies about what to do to
reimagine the learning environment to suit the child's real, but often
invisible, needs. The ideas range from accommodating children's sense of time,
to decluttering classrooms, to learning how to better observe and listen as
children express themselves in pictures and words.
With her strong foundation in the study of
child development and early education and her own in-the-trenches classroom
experience, Christakis peels back the mystery of early childhood, revealing a
place that's rich with possibility. Her message is energizing and reassuring:
Parents have more power (and more knowledge) than they think they do, and young
children are inherently creative and will flourish, if we can learn new ways to
support them and restore their vital learning habitat.
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