Should preschools teach all work and no play?

Victoria Clayton • E-mail

When it comes to selecting a preschool, parents of 3- and 4-year-olds face a dilemma: do you go for the one that calls itself an “academic” preschool or do you enroll your child in the fun place?

Danielle Senffner, a mother of two in Thousand Oaks, Calif., says the ongoing debate about the value of play-based preschools versus academic preschools is common coffee talk among parents in her suburban community. “Most parents are still confused about which type of preschool is best,” says Senffner.

She has read all the books touting the benefits of play and has even taken early childhood development classes, yet that didn’t squelch the misgivings in her family that their first preschool — a program based on child-initiated free play — was all their son needed. “When my husband came to observe, his perception was, ‘Oh, it’s so much fun, but they’re not learning anything. There’s no guidance,’” she recalls.

So the Senffners decided to supplement their son’s playful preschool by sending him two days a week to another school at a nearby Lutheran church that touts itself as a more academic preschool.

“We had other reasons for doing this too — at the second preschool they add a little religion in, which is an important thing on my husband’s side of the family,” she says. But the biggest reason, Senffner admits, was to make sure their son, now 5, was accustomed to a scheduled, academic environment.

Academics vs. play
While once the statement would’ve sounded absurd, being “academically prepared” for kindergarten is now a new and real parental concern, says Larry Schweinhart, president of High/Scope, a nonprofit educational research foundation in Ypsilanti, Mich.

“Parents have reason to be concerned about this because of the ‘push down’ we’ve experienced,” he says. “Kindergartners are now expected to learn what first-graders once learned. It’s something we’ve been talking about for years, but it’s just gotten worse.”

Many school administrators and educators have decided kids need to learn more, and earlier, to meet achievement targets set up by programs such as No Child Left Behind.

But is choosing academic programs for 3- and 4-year-olds a real route to success in kindergarten and beyond?

Not according to David Elkind, a professor of child development at Tufts University and author of “The Power of Play.”

Picking a good preschool Whatever a preschool labels itself, educational researchers are pretty much in agreement that the following are important indicators of quality programs: — The school should be safe, clean and stocked with a variety of different types of materials and equipment. — There should be structure, although it may look different from what adults expect, warns Marcon of the University of North Florida. “In preschools a lot of the structure is behind the scenes. The structure is in all the thought that’s put into the stimuli before the children arrive. Structure is in traffic flow, how the room is set up and how the teacher changes the stimuli and centers.” — There should be enough staff for teachers to work with small groups and individuals. Staff should be challenging children by asking open-ended questions rather than drilling them with facts and information. — There should be active involvement, says Catherine Scott-Little, an assistant professor of human development and family studies at the University of North Carolina in Greensboro, N.C. “We don’t want to see preschoolers sitting and listening to the teacher and only doing things the teacher tells them to do,” she says. “They need to be moving and trying things out. They need hands-on experiences.”

“It’s absolutely the wrong move,” says Elkind. He notes that while a few children might be extraordinary, the vast majority of human brains aren’t developed enough to truly learn reading or math concepts until they’ve reached the age of reason (typically at age 5 or 6), when they can understand “interval units,” a series of relationships in numbers and letters.

“When we try to teach children skills that require interval units before this age of reason, we run the risk of killing the child’s motivation for learning, for schooling and for respecting teachers,” says Elkind.

Raising independent thinkers
Rebecca Marcon, a developmental psychologist and education researcher at the University of North Florida in Jacksonville, agrees. In 1999, Marcon published a study in the journal Developmental Psychology that looked at 721 4-year-olds selected from three different preschool models: play based, academic (adult directed) and middle of the road (programs that did not follow either philosophy). Marcon followed the children’s language, self-help, social, motor and adaptive development along with basic skills.

“What we found in our research then and in ongoing studies is that children who were in a [play-based] preschool program showed stronger academic performance in all subject areas measured compared to children who had been in more academically focused or more middle-of-the-road programs,” says Marcon.

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