Interesting/disturbing numbers taken from a report by the Alliance for Childhood (did they spend much time coming up with that name?) called “Crisis in the Kindergarten: a new report on the disappearance of play”:
Minutes of standardized test prep, on average, that New York and Los Angeles kindergartners undergo each day: 24
Minutes of unstructured playtime they have: 25
(Yes, I know that’s in Harper’s Index language, but it’s my language. It also means I know the number is solid, as one of my incredible interns confirmed it.)
A lot of parents worry about sending their kids off to school for the first day. Here’s an example of why they’re right to. Turning our kids into soulless study robots in order to support a testing-based theory of educational “accountability” that has nothing to do with learning and everything to do with politics… sucks.
Closing of the American mind, anyone? Or are we hoping to work our kids into a test-prepped fugue state, similar to the one into which our NYC School Chancellor Joel Klein has slipped?
(Case in point: Klein recently claimed that only 1 percent of parents thought their kids did too much test prep at school. Response to this by one parent: ““That’s unbelievably ridiculous. You… are either in denial, or you’re trying to pretend to be in denial. I thought it was just a given you knew how much test prep was going on.”)
Neither one sounds particularly good. For all they are learning at school, might as well let the kiddies overdose on television and chocolate bars. And I’m not just saying that because that’s my parental philosophy.