Kindergarten

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One day, when my son was in kindergarten, I picked him up after school and asked, as every Mother asks, “How was school?” He responded, as almost every child responds, “OK.”

Trying to get a little more information, I asked him “Well, how was reading?” This response gave me a great deal more information than he intended:

“Lonely.”

“Lonely?” I asked. “How so?”

“Well, I’m the only one in my reading group,” he said.

This should not have surprised me, because J.R. had started teaching himself how to read at the age of three and by five was reading at a fourth-grade level. But reading wasn’t everything, and I didn’t like the idea that J.R. was isolated from the other children. So I went into school with him next day and told the teacher that it was not my goal that he be reading at a fifth-grade level when he left kindergarten, and that I was far more concerned about his social skills. Could she move him down into the next-highest reading group?

I thought she was going to kiss me.

This was a private school, you see, and most of the parents were shelling out the money for the classes in order to make sure that Dick and Jane got into a good prep school and a better college. That afternoon, when I asked J.R. about school, he said that he was in a new reading group and had a new book to read.

“It’s just a nonsense book, Mom,” he said. “It’s not serious. It’s about rhyming and stuff.”

I don’t know how well my ploy worked, because J.R. struggled with social skills all through his school life and on into his adulthood. He was an only child, and he spent too much time reading and watching educa­tional programs on TV. But I often think of that day, and I wonder how other parents and other teachers would have handled the problem.

We ask a lot of our teachers, and it looks like we’re going to be asking even more of them in the future. We expect them to keep our children in line, help them learn basic skills like organization and tidiness, on top of teaching them to read, write and do arithmetic. Sometimes, they are challenged to teach precepts like “Honesty is the best policy,” and “First come, first served.” Certainly when they accidentally teach the opposite, we come down on them like a load of bricks. No one wants their child taught “Me first – I’m the teacher’s pet.”

But now we are adding to a teacher’s plate items like financial literacy and parenting skills. When I hear of an attempt to insert “life skills” into the curriculum, I often think of a very fine book and movie called “To Sir, With Love.” The movie starred Sidney Poitier and came out in the late 60s. It told the story of a British engineer temporarily out of a job who took on a class of teenagers for a term and decided to teach them how to get along in life instead of boring them with academics.

The math he taught them involved making a budget and taking advantage of bargains; the reading was where to learn about the safety and value of products; the writing was filling out a job application and writing a resume. He also taught them how to take care of a baby, how to make decisions about big-ticket items like washers, dryers, and cars, and when to challenge the precepts on which they had been raised. Towards the end of the story, a close relative of the only minority student in class dies, and the teacher makes them understand that they should not be intimidated by “what people would think” into staying away from the funeral just because the boy and his relative are black.

This is a heart-warming story, and I recommend you find the book or the movie, but I found myself wondering if that approach would have worked with a class of college-bound students. The British school system ruthlessly categorizes its students almost from the day of their enrollment. The children of lower-class parents are pushed into classes that stress the practical and end at the age of 15, while the children of upper-class parents are aimed towards high school and college.

We say we don’t do that in this country, but looking at the results from inner-city school districts vs suburban school districts, it is hard to deny it. Where you are born has far more to do with your chance at success in life than almost any other factor. If you were born in Harlem, it will be a long, hard slog out of the mud; if you were born in Westchester, you have to work hard to fail. This is something I would like to change, but I have no idea how to make it happen.

Certainly, the parents are not likely to achieve it. They are usually the product of the system that is not working for their children. That’s why we’re asking the schools to take on so much of their job. In some areas, there is a non-profit (usually church-led) after-school effort to help kids with their homework and keep them out of gangs. These programs fill a gap, but in two or three hours a day they can hardly plug it.

No, time and again, we are forced back to the schools, the one place we KNOW students spend multiple hours each day. And we are forced to the conclusion that we must start younger than we are starting now, that actual damage may not be done but nothing positive is being built, either, when a child has little or no age-level-appropriate stimulation in the home.

So why not supplement the home? The conservatives call this impulse the “nanny state.” I think we should revel in the term. What these children need is an old-fashioned British nanny – or an old-fashioned mother and father. I don’t know how to return us to the nuclear family, but I do know how to get children out of the hands of mothers who don’t really want them and aren’t doing them any good.

I’m not suggesting that the state take full custody of these children – just that the state make sure they are receiving the intellectual care they need at a young age. Then the child is “given back” at the end of the day. If a mother wants to fight the system, she can – by proving that she does what’s needed at home. But if she can’t prove it, the child should go to the school during the day, where he or she learns to be one of a crowd, part of a team, citizen of a nation.

It would require a major investment – in appropriate classrooms, equipment, and teachers – but it would be a boon to the economy. All those young mothers freed to work at a job while the child is in school would mean a great deal of tax money coming into our government coffers – probably almost enough to pay for the program. In addition, we could have a means-tested scale of contributions paid by the mothers and fathers whose children were in the program.

If they were not employed, they would have no excuses for not looking for a job. If they were unemployable or if they wanted to rise, there would be no bar to them going to classes at technical institutes or community colleges. We ought to see a decrease in the number of child abuse cases as the parents have time to themselves to get themselves in order and on a track to success. Public service advertising could make all this seem “cool.”

In other words, giving the babies, toddlers, and pre-kindergarten children access to the stimulation and care they need might, just might, give the mothers and fathers what they need to build a better world.

And maybe more parents and teachers would be faced with kindergarteners who already know how to read.
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