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.
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