Is our educational system modern day child labor and abuse.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YhpM_jbVopo


I was lucky enough to attend a TEDx conference at Miami University, OH and this is one of the presentations that truly stuck with me.  Fromberg poses such really thought provoking questions within this presentation which I also pose to my students, although not so eloquently and definitely not so strongly.  I urge you to watch this link and ask yourself what we are doing to our young children, what are our expectations and to see the detriments of an approach that truly is reflective of child labor and abuse.  Don't our children deserve more?

why do we need Enhancements in Early ChildhoodEducation?

I can't believe that it has been a week since I have returned from my conference and trip to Atlanta, but have yet to post anything since there were so many things I want to post and discuss.  I will start with post because for some reason it continues to be something I think about following our trip.  While I spent the majority of my day in sessions (of which I also hope to share), my last day following my sessions I was able to accompany my family to the Atlanta Aquarium.  I always struggle when I go to a zoo, aquarium or such because it calls me to question whether this is a better environment for them than their natural habitats.  As you can see this is similar to my questions about quality practices in early childhood.  This will become more explicit as you read the followign.
While we were looking at the Beluga Whales, one of them began to play with and pull to the surface of the water an object connected to an according type band.   While we were watching this, the woman from the aquarium discussed how they provide "enhancements" so the whales don't get board and are challenged.  I found myself thinking that if they were in their natural environment there would be no need for "enhancements", they would just naturally occur within their daily encounters within their habitat.  Having come from numerous sessions, I immediately began to consider how we do the same thing to children.  We put them in such artificial environments that we then have to provide "enhancements" to support their engagement in the classroom.  And yet, if we just allowed them to engage with their world in meaningful ways, there would be no need for ehancements or what are often called "specials" because children would naturally engage in meaningful ways with the knowledge, content and skills of the world.  This whole idea of artificially engaging students when there is such a context for natural, meaningful and authentic means of interacting with the world proves so meaningless and wasteful.  Projects provide the context for meaningfully embedding quality learning and teaching experiences through what Slyvia Chard defines as "local" topics.  By engaging children in things of their world, we don't need enhancements, we merely need to face the world with the same inquisitiveness as that of young children as they take a simple walk around the block. 

What ever happened to the pre-operational stage?

How many times have I taught my students and covered the stages of Piaget, particularly those which most affect the field of early childhood education, the sensorimotor and pre-operational stage?  And yet suddenly we were having the discussion about the shift from sensorimotor to pre-operational in one of my classes and it struck me that in many of our educational practices currently and the incredible high stakes testing push we are skipping this incredibly important stage and the repercussions I feel will be severe.  We quickly remove active learning for passive, abstract thinking when we know children cognitively cannot process half of what we ask of them, all in the name of what?  Worksheets according to Piaget would prove obsolete to the learning process and yet teachers continue to cling to them as proof that children are "learning".  Learning what, to follow directions and robotically complete them as fast as they can in order to escape this mundane work?  On the whole we continue to appropriately support children birth to three and yet the removal of developmentally appropriate practices continues to be pushed to younger ages.  One student shared with me that she observed word of the week in a toddler classroom (what are we doing to our young childen?)  We are robbing our children of childhood which in mind truly is a criminal act that will prove detrimental not only to the children, but society as a whole.  It is time to return childhood back to our youngest, to support them developmentally and stop cramming obsolete, unnecessary experiences into our early childhood classrooms.  We need to engage them with the things of the world, not disengage them from who they are and how they learn.