I agreed with a lot of what President Obama said during his state of the union except that we should have mandated preschool throughout the country. More school is not the answer especially when we do such a poor job providing a good education in the grades the country already provides, K-12.
We are still following an archaic system that was designed to produce good factory workers and a system that is not often well taylored toward boys. Guarian and Stevens explains in “The Minds of Boys: Saving Our Sons From Falling Behind in School and Life” why our present school system is biased against at least half our population which doesn’t learn well sitting and listening but needs to do and interact to best learn. We also have an SOL dependent system that isn’t working that results in teachers actually saying to their kids that they have to do well or their teacher will loose her job. SOLs only tie the hands of the best teachers in our education system. In addition, we have children that otherwise seem normal medicated to get them to stay still in class during a time of growth when movement and interaction is key to their understanding of the world.
We are out of touch with what children need. They don’t need more time in school. They need dedicated primary care givers that involve them with their lives, love them and teach them about the world as they interact with it. You are asking too much to expect a teacher of 20+ students to be able to provide this to their young students. We need to educate parents on how to engage their children and incorporate them into their lives. We need to educate parents on how and why to prevent pregnancy until they are ready to dedicate the time and attention needed to raise the next generation. That is the answer.