Reply to News 4: Since when was it the school's responsibility to teach kids how to tie their shoes?

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Reply to "News 4: Since when was it the school's responsibility to teach kids how to tie their shoes?"

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]I thought we learned these things in either preschool or kindergarten. Telling time. Tying a shoe. Buttoning buttons. But I did Montessori for part of early childhood, so maybe it’s different. [/quote]

Yes, Montessori is now basically the only place you will learn this actually at school (well, maybe Waldorf, though Waldorf has a stronger "just let them explore" ethos than Montessori, though they do emphasize stuff like handwriting that other schools have totally dropped).

But I went to a non-Montessori preschool and a regular public (half day!) kindergarten, and learned all of this in ECE. I'm sure my mom supported it at home too, but I distinctly remember getting lessons in and time to practice these skills in preschool/kindergarten. Now, kindergarten especially is very academic. And of course rather than looking at whether this shift is serving us as a society, we're just going to yell at working parents for not teaching their kids to tie their shoes.

The American education system (public and private) is so ridiculously reactive. It's like we don't have real cultural values around childhood or education to guide us, so we just constantly swing the pendulum to respond to external factors. Like the emphasis on academics in earlier grades is absolutely caused, in part, by all the fear mongering that the US is losing its edge to Asia (and before that to Russia). The whole mess with reading education was based on a theory (that has turned out to be false) about how kids acquire reading skills, so we bounced from everyone doing Lucy Caulkins to now everyone hammering phonics to death. It's all just very reactionary and watching it unfold you realize the degree to which basically no one in charge of education in this country has any idea what they are doing.[/quote]

Wow, all of what you wrote is spot on. I do mix Montessori inspired stuff into home life (chores, wooden/simple toys, traditional legos and math manipulatives over electronics, gardening) and supplement math and music education at home. But the list of things I feel I need to teach is growing. DS’s handwriting and spelling are pretty bad and I’m not even sure cursive and keyboard typing taught in our district. We spent lots of money to make sure our kindergarteners have iPads, though.

Ugh Lucy Caulkins. I taught DS how to read after reading about Balanced Literacy here (thanks DCUM!) but was only working part time and don’t have other kids. I really feel for parents working full time out of the home and trying to teach their kids, especially those with multiple kids. I don’t know how you do it. I also know teachers have their hands tied. I don’t know what the solution is, but we need a sea change.

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