“Why Preschool Shouldn’t Be Like School”?

Under the heading, “Why Preschool Shouldn’t Be Like School,” cognitive psychologist Alison Gopnik describes research showing that four-year-olds learn better if they’re encouraged to discover and show to others, rather than if they’re taught what to do. This makes sense, but it’s not clear to me why this wouldn’t apply to older kids and adults. It’s a commonplace in teaching at all levels that students learn by doing and by demonstrating what they can do. Even when a student is doing nothing but improvising from a template, we generally believe the student will learn better by explaining what’s going on, by having a mental model of the process to go along with the proverbial 10,000 hours or practice. The challenge is in the implementation, how to get students interested, motivated, and focused enough to put the effort into learning.

So why the headline above? Why does Gopnik’s research support the idea that preschool should be different from school? I’m not trying to disagree with Gopnik here. I just don’t understand the reasoning.

P.S. One more thing, which certainly isn’t Gopnik’s fault but it’s pretty funny/scary, given that it’s the 21st century and all. Slate put this item in the category “Doublex: What women really think about news, politics, and culture.” What? It wasn’t good enough for “Science”? No, that space was taken by “The eco-guide to responsible drinking.” But, sure, I guess it makes sense: kids in school . . . that sounds like it belongs on the women’s page, along with Six recipes to get your kids to eat their vegetables, etc.

11 thoughts on ““Why Preschool Shouldn’t Be Like School”?

  1. Without reading the article, it would appear to be a very Piagetian approach to pre-school. Piaget characterized children as 'little scientists' who develop through exploration of their environment. I would suppose the alternative is early socialization into the industrial model that is K-12?

  2. Perhaps the interpretation of the headline should be something like:

    "Preschools should not be like schools for older children currently are"

    In other words, there's evidence that the way schools are run for older children is not good for pre-schoolers. It might also be the case that for older students the current model is ALSO a bad idea, but this study doesn't address that.

  3. Here is a data point to support the claim that the "explore and show" approach should also work for adults:

    After completing my undergrad degree and starting an exploratory research program (recipe: take a first time supervisor and a stubbornly independent grad student, mix them bi-weekly), I've felt that in each year of grad studies I've "learned" more in that year than all the previous years of my life combined.

  4. The title addresses the trend of pushing academics down and down the age scale. While schools, it seems, are doomed to “rigor” for considerable spell, there is a fighting chance with younger kids. Just choosing her battles, I suppose.

  5. Even though I agree with the conclusion, I think the two experiments described don't say much that is useful.

    In both cases, the kids are presented with a new toy, and shown some properties of it. But sometimes these properties are shown as if by "accident", so there is no reason for the kid to think those are the only interesting properties, whereas other times, a "teacher" demonstrates some properties of the toy, in a context that implies that there isn't anything else interesting about the toy, since if there were, the teacher, who is familiar with the toy, would have demonstrated the other interesting things too.

    It hardly seems surprising that the kids shown the toy by the "teacher" then assume that it's a boring toy that doesn't do anything else interesting. I don't see how this says anything about school, where presumably a teacher who says "here's how to add numbers" does not do so in a way that implies "the only thing interesting that you can do with numbers is add them".

    I think the real reason that school is a dubuious idea is that (a) the things the teachers think it's important to learn aren't what is really important to learn, and (b) the social context of school is totally artificial. Later in life, one doesn't associate only with people whose birthdays are within 12 months of one's own…

  6. Radford,

    When you say that the things teachers think it is important to learn are not the really important things to learn aren't you basically saying that they don't know the interesting/important properties of the toys? Or are you saying that the teachers just don't know which toys to exhibit in the first place?

  7. aren't you basically saying that they don't know the interesting/important properties of the toys? Or are you saying that the teachers just don't know which toys to exhibit in the first place?

    Probably both, but either way, the experiments don't seem relevant.

    What I have in mind are things like forcing grade-school kids to memorize the names and locations of several dozen counties that they will likely never visit, to take an example from my own education. A probably less idiosyncratic example would be forcing kids to learn how to write cursively with forms of upper-case letters that include funny loops that are never found anywhere outside grade school. With more ideological content, there's the practice of telling stories (and testing on them, of course) that are favourable to historical figures while failing to mention facts about them that would lead one to realize that they were really rather horrible people.

  8. Kindergarten is now like first grade used to be, with lots of book learning. Manhattanites pay to have preschool like kindergarten to get their kids ready for the ERB's Wechsler IQ test for admission to exclusive kindergartens.

    Meanwhile, in Finland, they don't start first grade to age 7. And Finns do really good on the PISA.

    I don't think anybody knows what works best.

  9. Steve:

    Not quite. We pay big bucks for preschool here because it costs a lot of money here whether or not you're trying to get your kid to pass some special test. There aren't a lot of low-cost preschool options, especially when you get to the lower ages such as 2 and 3.

    In any case, there's a lot of variation in what people are looking for.

    There are two things that irritate me about people who deride rich urban white parents. (I'm not saying you're deriding us, merely that your comment reminded me of this). The first thing is that the haters can't decide whether to mock us for obsessing over preschool admissions, get angry at us for ruling the world and hogging all the Ivy League slots, feel sorry for us for obsessing over trivialities, or chortle at the irony that our kids are still going to lose out to their hardworking Asian rivals.

    The second thing that annoys me is that half the time the haters are criticizing us for being helicopter parents who are obsessing over getting our kids into Harvard based on the choice of preschool, and the other half of the time we're being mocked for being too lazy to really push our kids. See, for example, this article by Caitlin Flanagan, who wears her insincerity on her sleeve and writes like a cut-rate Tom Wolfe. (I love Tom Wolfe, so I see the appeal, but I don't think Flanagan can pull it off.)

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