© 2008 Michael Swickard, Ph.D.
There was an interesting article last week in the online Wall Street Journal, “What makes Finnish kids so smart?” The Finns excel in the Program for International Assessment competitions that test 15 year olds.
People can come up with many reasons for their success. One thing Finns do caught my eye. They do not send their students to school until they are seven years old. They have day care, but not formal school, before that.
On the first day in school for Finns, many American kids already have had three years. With three extra years of school, why do our students not beat the Finns eight years later?
Our early entry to school might be the problem. Perhaps the Finns do not start students so early to allow the frontal lobe portion of their kid’s brain to be more developed when academic information is applied. In day care they let their kids sing, play, nap and snack, like we used to do.
Over the last 50 years American schools have been starting students earlier and earlier. In the 1950s there were very few children going to kindergarten, and some students even went half days to first grade at age six. In
Now
When most of us were in kindergarten we went half a day to sing, play, nap and eat snacks. We learned letters, colors and numbers in games and came home saying, “School is fun.”
Nowadays, kindergarteners sit quietly doing lots of work and little play. Why? The change is not research-based. Administrators are caught up with the “not tough enough” fad and are trying to juke the accountability tests by teaching the test material earlier and earlier. This way, theoretically, when students finally take the test they will do well. But it does not work that way.
Another problem is that some people who have not been in school since rabbit ears were used for television feel that school is just too much fun. Yeah, about a third of students drop out of our schools before graduation because it is just so much fun, eh?
There was an episode of M*A*S*H where one character said that he never smiled while in the Army because if the Army thought he was enjoying himself, they would change that. Is that what we are doing in our schools? If the children seem happy, let’s make it so they are not?
Age-appropriate learning
Those who want to put this extra rigor in the 5-year-old’s curriculum should be arrested for child abuse because, despite administrators wanting student to do certain tasks, until their frontal lobe permits it, they are powerless to do so. The students are neither stupid nor lazy.
Research explains that the frontal lobe must develop to allow two-stage answers. It holds one piece of data in the short-term memory and uses that to work on another piece of data. If the frontal lobe has not developed sufficiently, there is no way the child can perform those skills.
Example: First-grade teachers at a school were ordered to teach monetary comparison. The administrators wanted the students to do well on the fourth-grade tests in three years. So for a year the students labored every day identifying pennies, nickels, dimes and quarters. That is child’s play for you and me but proved impossible for them.
The time on monetary identification was done at the loss of age-appropriate learning. Worse, most children went away thinking themselves stupid. And in fourth grade, where they do have their frontal lobe ability, these students still may score significantly lower since they will remember never getting the answer right while in first grade.
Maybe the Finns know that students who start at seven will innately understand what they are learning and will do so at a pace that catches up rapidly to the Americans and then passes them before middle school.
The Finns are using educational solutions to educational problems, unlike
Before you protest that early entry in American schools is not the only problem, yes, I agree. We have many other things we need to fix. This is just one of the problems that can be solved if we so desire to do so.
Some people may ask, “What will we do with the children instead of throwing them under the bus, er, sending them to school early?”
We should find some place for them to go that is age-appropriate. I am more concerned that people may say that adjusting the entry schedule might cost some teachers their jobs, so we cannot do it. How sad.
Schools need to be about the students, not the adults. Maybe that focus on kids is what makes the Finnish school system work better than ours.
Swickard is a weekly columnist for this site. You can reach him at michael@swickard.com.