I heard a phrase on the radio, as part of describing the value of a city's program to make Pre-K accessible to more people*
It wasn't so much what was said that set off my train of thought. It was the reflection of childhood and the conditions of raising and being a child , as construed by a society where, as the statement read,
"pre-K is the best way to prepare children for success in the school system."
Pre-K is for children 3-5 years old.
Now, let's think about that.
Childhood as a distinct phase is a recent concept. But what does it mean?
Is Childhood a period of time open to external intervention to improve the odds of performing well on measures of much later developed skills?
Or is it a developmental phase that is already "taken" for development of primary skills; ways of reacting to experiences that will affect the degree to which challenges of subsequent phases will be resolved with greater ability, and the odds of doing well in life according to what the growing person will come to perceive that to mean?
If Childhood is the latter; what are long term effects of making kids' time and experiences either a prep for, a time off in between, or the active and direct engagement with, one or more zero-sum games/systems?
I am talking about the systems for accessing resources and stations in society; supposedly distributed according to merits, but on the level of individual experience, very often and increasingly so, might just as well be the hunger games.
The diversity of the US population justify some kind of efforts to even out the inequalities in access to resources that affect the ability of children to acquire primary skills and competencies in the school system. Especially as factors related to innate potential matter less generally than factors affected and constrained by the social and financial resources of their context and family when it comes to performing well according to outcomes used as proxies of educational receptivity and "success".
But does it justify turning toddlers into subjects of precisely that kind of conditional approval and assessments that, at least for me, Childhood as a phase of a person's life once was defined by the absence of?
Being prepped is to have one's experiences and process of learning from them geared, and one's behavior assessed, in accordance with expectations on future performance.
We have encoded into law that children must be gradually introduced to adult responsibilities.
Should this not also include gradual initiation to being a subject of assessment and to the notion of failing.
The system of mandatory education (K-12) assess and dress your skills and abilities in preparation for life in the US society, and for university, which may or may not postpone your total immersion into that same, general, society.
OF course, the pay-to-play or "it's not what you can become, but who you know and who's kid you are" process of actually getting in to a "reputable" University , runs for most young people parallel with the zero sum game of getting a job; a Rat Race that most students (an overwhelming majority of students at high school, community college, online college, or traditional college or university, in the US work; not surprisingly, as their parents tend to contribute less while on average tuition has increased, and I cannot imagine working students face wages that are any less likely to be stagnant than people in general do) *
There is nothing new or wrong in parents' natural desire to provide what they believe will be a start that in retrospect can be linked causally to a general sense of satisfaction with the life their child will come to live and they way they will come to understand their child is feeling about his or her life.
But this now includes using products sold as stimulating cognitive performance and development, and competing with other parents for pre-K's with prep-credentials, excluding as many as 90% of applicants.
Why such amount of trepidation over, and attention to, how someone who in many ways is yet to come into being will do when subjected to assessments of something yet to occur; namely, the response to institutionalized and standardized education and socialization?
More precisely it is an assessment of a person's ability to display the accepted indications of having learned, the right things at the right developmental phase, without taking too long.
It would be more understandable, although not necessarily justifiable, if there was at least a good correlation between "succeeding in the school system" and quality of life. I consider quality of life n this context to mean not spending most of one's time in fear of missing a beat in keeping up with making a living.
Never mind actually having a life.
The both tragic and liberating implications of strong predictive pattern in data, gathered about how much it matters which college or university; is that this is neither a determining nor consistently predicting variable of future happiness.
The problem is that this future role for which a young child is prepped, may not come to have any useful correlation with whatever the person will come to define and find as subjective well-being and contentment.
What that might turn out to be is anyway impossible to know at the age at which kids are signalled that it really really matters, and matters so much as to make their parents loose sleep.
Footnotes
* It was Richard Buery, New York City's deputy mayor for strategic policy initiative, on an episode of the Brian Lehrer show; talking and taking calls about the city's program to make Pre-K universally accessible for
New Yorkers
http://feeds.wnyc.org/~r/wnyc_bl/~5/InZVHlkTZiI/bl031715apod.mp3
* Nearly four out of five U.S. students — including those in high school, community college, online college, or traditional college or university — work while in school, a survey by Citigroup and Seventeen magazine found, with the average working student putting in 19 hours a week during the school year.
Ann Shoket, editor-in-chief of Seventeen magazine. “Students are starting blogs and video production companies,” she says. “They want to start their careers before they leave college.”
Parents are kicking in less of money for college. Parents still pay for most of the average family’s total college expenses. But their contribution, including from savings, income and loans, averaged 37% in 2011, down from 47% the year before, according to the “How America Pays for College” survey by student-loan company Sallie Mae.
The cost of tuition has risen dramatically in recent years for most educational institutions, studies show. The cost of undergraduate tuition — including room and board — surged 42% in the past 10 years (adjust for inflation) to $13,600 at public institutions for the 2010-11 academic year; it rose 31% to $36,300 at private nonprofit institutions over the same period, according to the U.S. Department of Education’s National Center for Education Statistics.
http://www.marketwatch.com/story/nearly-4-out-of-5-students-work-2013-08-07