RSG | Press Page: Universal pre-school considered

The coming trend in educational circles is universal pre-school.

At the moment it's little more than an idea, because the cost of providing pre-kindergarten schooling for everybody's children represents a good deal more than a mere incremental spending increase — and in this economy, most towns and cities are having difficulty even with those incremental increases, never mind anything more fiscally significant.

But there's no doubt about the trend and the educational thinking: kids who spend time in a learning environment from a very early age have a leg up on those who don't. This was underlined in the report "Opening the Kindergarten Door," issued late last month by the Connecticut Commission on Children. The report is based on information provided by kindergarten teachers in 11 communities (including Meriden) which have been identified as priority districts.

Essentially — as described in the "executive summary" — youngsters who enter kindergarten with two years of pre-school teaching are perceived to be better ready for teaching in language skills, in math, in emotional skills, and in fine motor skills than youngsters who have not had such preparation.

The Commission report goes on to recommend — it doesn't really require deep thought to grasp this — that all youngsters in priority schools and school districts have full access to two years of pre-school which is standardized and coordinated with the kindergarten programs.

This is all so obviously true that you wonder why it needs saying, but we are a culture which benefits — like school children — from official repetition. As my friend says, "repetition is the basis of all learning."

I think, however, that "Opening the Kindergarten Door" is going to surprise some people and provoke a negative reaction. After all, it's evident that the information was compiled from kindergarten teachers by the school system. Kindergarten teachers are a good and devoted lot, and I do not mean to insult them in any way. It is, nonetheless, a fact that kindergarten teachers have a particular point of view on what skills children should have at particular ages and that view is based on the system in use in their school systems.

And the State Department of Education has a point of view as well: if pre-kindergarten education is to be organized and coordinated, what group is likely to be put in charge of organizing and coordinating? Odds are it will not be the Department of Transportation.

For those who were blessed enough to be born into families which provided a loving and nurturing environment and whose parent figures exposed them to the opportunity to learn, it seems a little absurd to think about providing state supervised universal pre-school. For myself, even though I was born during World War II and my Dad was overseas for a couple of years, I had my mother and four doting grandparents who all had the time and the inclination to interact with me, answer my questions, take me on excursions to the store, eat dinner with me, read to me, and a hundred and one other wonderful things.

But without that, where would I have been? Who would I be?

This report is not aimed at taking kids out of homes where there are adults who provide a nurturing environment but at bringing youngsters whose homes lack such nurture to places where it is to be found. As I said before, it isn't rocket science to appreciate out that kids do better with good preschool experience than without it. And while the education department has not yet achieved perfection, is there really any other body, governmental or private, that is capable of attempting to organize pre-schools? Nursery schools, day care, and pre-k differ one from another in all sorts of ways, and most of present regulation issues from town health departments. Pre-school learning is less well organized than public school; it's fragmented and each facility follows its own drummer — some of whom are different and very far away.

This should change. When I was a kid, many children had a parent at home to provide the sort of safety net for whatever a child needed. Today it is a truism: parents work. Single parents work; married parents work. Children need to be somewhere supervised while this work goes on or, too often and too alone, will wind up with too much television or too much of worse troubles.

To preserve an intelligent and interactive adult work force, we need well-adjusted and educated adults. The world is changed: to help these adults take shape, we need to make sure that preparation for school happens for those who need it.