In terms of addressing the sad state of education in much of the US (but not all), I’d lean towards less time worrying about drag queens and white privelege. But that’s what the education professors are teaching their trainees on the certification programs, more and more, so why should these teachers be valued more by the public?
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Just look into research on the difference between children who start K5 having been through quality K3 and K4 programs vs children who did not. There is a massive difference. Especially terrible is for children whose first interaction with other children is in elementary school. They lost out on at least three years of learning how to interact with others and solve conflicts, just like the pandemic. Even just being surrounded by other children near their age and having the chance to observe them and mimic them makes a huge difference in who they become in elementary school and beyond.
The child of 0-6 has a brain that literally takes in everything in the environment. Have you not met four year olds who know everything it seems there is to know about dinosaurs or specific types of trains or airplanes or leaf formations or whatever else they latched onto? Children of that age can pretty much be taught anything, if they are given the right conditions to learn. Unfortunately, most schools take this to mean it’s time for workbooks and textbooks and drilling so they’ll be ready for elementary school, which is not how children of this age learn. What they need is hands on experiences that allow them to physically experience the world and adults and peers to teach them everything they want to learn. Well-run, hands-on learning environments can build children who are reading chapter books at age six and easily fly though math that most schools don’t introduce until middle school or beyond. Not because those children are brilliant but because the schools are able to recognize the needs of the children and present information to them in a way that gets their interest and gives them the freedom to explore until they’re satisfied.
So your mom taught you to read before your school did and then you got through undergrad despite having crappy professors? Sounds like your mom helped to make sure you had the skills you needed to be successful, despite having teachers that didn’t teach you.
Based on what you did type above, it sounds like the help of your mother, because you didn’t get foundational help from your teachers, made sure you didn’t fail in college. In other words, without the help of your mother, the education system would have failed you. If this isn’t what you mean, you will need to elaborate. It if is what you mean, you literally proved my point.
Yeah, stop trying to ban drag shows and woke math books and start focusing on how to teach children how to sound out the letters on the page of a book and how to add and subtract. That’s a policy I can get behind.
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Yes, despite not having a high school education herself. Because teachers of young children need not be as qualified and highly paid as medical doctors. Young children are genetically programmed to be learning machines.
No
Pass. You are welcome to read it again.
Sorry, it isn’t, and I didn’t.
How many teachers are doing this? I think it is the parents who are doing this.
Yeah, you’d think the certified teachers would be on board, but not always. That’s ok, there is a lot of variety; being a certified teacher isn’t much guarantee of anything, really 
Surely they both work? I’m a product of early Taiwanese drill the math into their little heads, and the basics certainly seemed to take, for most.
Kumon can do this as well. Through endless worksheets and drilling. 
I just want to join in the 1-6 v.s. 6-whatever discussion. The more I look at artificial neural networks, the more I think humans really do learn in a very similar manner. The physics of updating/storing weights or generating reward might be different, but the concept of interconnected tiered pattern matching is very similar.
1 to 6 year olds are basically training mostly unsupervised and learning basic pattern matching and language skills that can then be transferred to other skills when they are older. If the 1-6 pre-training gives the child a very diverse collection of inputs for them to process in a fun way that will be retained, then there’s more stuff for the kid to draw on when tackling more complex tasks when they are older. Some of these pre-training can only be done in a very short period of time, like telling apart certain phonemes.
So I think education for 1-6-year-olds is very important, although what the kids need are more time, attention, and stimulus, nothing that requires someone as highly skilled as an M.D…
And by ten they can’t remember a single thing about the subject they learnt. The process of learning to absorb is more important than the subject matter.
Also, the language learnt has a big impact on development, spelling in particular. And gender. Boys fare worse than girls at learning English until around the age of 11 (?) no matter how much you intervene.
Yup my son went to a kindy where children were taught in Japanese. 3 years of that yet by ten could hardly remember any Japanese.
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Sounds like what you’re saying, which I don’t disagree with, a good parent can do. Take your kids to a library like my mom did and buy me lots of interesting books on subjects I wanted to learn about. Bring the kid out to play with other kids. Go to museums and put to explore in nature.
None of which seems to really require expensive educators paid over 100k
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Rightly or wrongly, educators will get paid the market rate. This includes the public sector, even with Union intervention. If pay rates are too low there will be a dearth of teachers, so salaries will be increased. This doesn’t seem to have happened. Arguing that one should be worth more generally doesn’t work in the marketplace.
It’s basically moot whether very young learner teachers should be paid the same as doctors. It’s never going to happen.
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What we need to do is shrink the tools so they can gleefully and without question operate the machinery.
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I know people in my former district who are thinking of resigning to be hired back at a higher salary. And our department head is the one who suggested it. If you don’t have tenure yet, why not?
I’d have to do a PhD for a chance of tenure, and in the current climate it would be highly improbable. Tenure would be nice, obviously, but it’s not that important. It certainly won’t help if one’s university closes.
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The problem really is you need the little beggars to be able to read so they don’t chop their fingers off in the machines, rendering them useless to the workforce. And all the damn socialists who seem to be against it. Otherwise, a capital suggestion sir. Capital!
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I think if we teach them to read emojis problem solved. 
Your mom was one person helping one child, who is also her offspring. She had a vested interest in seeing you succeed. She spent the first years of your life observing what you tended to do and when you needed things. She could help you in ways a total stranger being paid minimum wage to supervise you wouldn’t bother. And I can point you in the direction of research on “structure less ‘play learning’ is not an effective strategy as a means to teach anyone”. Children absorb everything in their environment, but that’s going to be precious little information if they’re trapped in a play pin and watching TV for their entire preschool existence. They still need guidance and structured, sensorial opportunities to learn. Your mom, at minimum taught you to read. This means she didn’t plop you in front of the television but rather facilitated your learning. Not all children have the opportunity to have this experience. “Play-based babysitting” run by a bunch of 16 year olds that have a few proper adults making sure no one dies is a pathetic solution when the children need adults who have advanced degrees in what’s going on in a young child’s brain and can meet the interests and needs of each child.
Well, if you’re not going to elaborate, you said that you had early literacy skills thanks to your mom and therefore didn’t fail college. Your mom, aka your first teacher and one who needed you to succeed because you were her child, made sure of that. Every child deserves a teacher in early childhood that will make sure they succeed, but most don’t have that opportunity because of how education and our economy is set up
Adults that don’t have children in some school districts are being paid a lot to seek out drag and book banning and make it seem like literally anyone cares. It doesn’t matter who’s wasting the resources on drag and book banning since governments are the ones making sure these things are followed through on. Way more attention is being placed on that than any other element of education and it shows how much could be accomplished if the govnemrnet would invest in things that are needed, instead of things that are irrelevant. We can add affirmative action to the list of things the government doesn’t need to waste time and energy banning, because there are too many more important things that they’re failing to address.
Well, since you’re not an educator I can understand if you don’t know about the investigative journalism that’s come out on the past few years, with one from 2022 that set off a firestorm, about how American children have been being taught to “guess words”, not “sound them out”, for the past 20+ years. I know I learned phonics, but apparently schools across the country were teaching their kids something called “The Three Cueing System”, where sounding out words was done as a last resort, and has lead to a generation of children who are illiterate, because teachers were being taught children this method, despite no science to back it up. Now that there’s attention on the issue, all sorts of laws are being passed left and right that basically just make sure anyone who isn’t literate doesn’t pass third grade, which is not the same thing as figuring out how to make them literate.
I’ve seen many many parents complain. The only childless agitators I’ve seen seem to be on the pro drag Queen side.
Because preschool shouldn’t be about becoming really good at being a student. You don’t learn social skills or about how the world works or even develop your find motor skills if you’re sitting in desks memorizing shit at the age of five. You can succeed in school, but it’s not preparing you for your existence as a member of society.
Yeah, but that’s route memorization and it’s not developmentally appropriate, even if it produces brilliant test takers. Woohoo! A society of people who can pass paper tests and can’t do anything else!
That’s interesting, because the people doing the agitating can easily be looked up by the public and it seems to keep coming out that these people have zero connection to the schools they’re flipping out at. And it’s interesting that people obsessed with parental rights seem so interested in telling other parents what to do