Summer vacations in most of the schools across the Kingdom are just around the corner. Schoolchildren will then have time in abundance, which otherwise they spend on homework and studying.
Children, especially those in the early grades, would like to spend this time running and playing around and just being kids. Some parents look at these activities as a waste of time and they think that their children should do something constructive during the summers.
This mentality is contributing to the popularity of summer schools in the Kingdom. Summer schools are places where these kids usually go through the same routine and do the same stuff; they do during a normal school day.
A lot of us have fallen for the idea that the more education children receive at this tender age, the smarter or competent they become.
Here is the issue though, “a growing group of scientists, education researchers and educators say there is little evidence that this approach improves long-term achievement; in fact, it may have the opposite effect, potentially slowing emotional and cognitive development, causing unnecessary stress and perhaps even souring kids’ desire to learn,” as reported in The New York Times.
The problem spreading among “most” of the educational institutions is that they are reshaping their classes and the way they are providing education to young children to be more teacher-led instead of giving the children the freedom to interact and acquire and deduce and choose their own way to acquire information. In other words, younger children’s classes are reshaped to resemble older kids and higher grades classes. In the Kingdom, it is not only happening in public schools, it is spreading among international schools as well — the same schools that love nothing more than advertising their American and British curricula. Their new and improved class environments are not much different from the free public schools.
They have nothing unique to offer other than giving the information in English instead of Arabic.
Nancy Carlsson-Paige, a professor emerita of education at Lesley University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, talked about her research touring children schools around the United States, “(This is a) profound misunderstanding of how children learn.”
“I’ve seen it many, many times in many, many classrooms — kids being told to sit at a table and just copy letters. They don’t know what they’re doing. It’s heartbreaking.”
Those arguing against such an approach to education, teacher-led classes that is, are claiming that such approach is limiting the sense of innovation and discovery young minds usually need and enjoy, turning them into passive machines receiving the information, processing it, archiving it to memory and eventually putting it on paper.
This does not mean that early education is bad for children, or they better be kept out of kindergarten levels; it is all about the approach and style of education they receive at those early levels, and it is about our expectations of how our kids should perform at such a young age.
Early instructions in reading, writing, and math may help some students, but its long term effects are not yet decisive.
A 2009 study by Sebastian P. Suggate, an education researcher at Alanus University in Germany, looked at about 400,000 15-year-olds in more than 50 countries and found that early school entry provided no advantage.
Another study by Dr. Suggate, published in 2012, looked at a group of 83 students over several years and found that those who started at age 5 had lower reading comprehension than those who began learning later, reported the New York Times.
Rebecca A. Marcon, a psychology professor at the University of North Florida, has found that early didactic instruction could worsen the overall academic performance of children. Studying 343 children distributed between schools that encourage teacher-led classes and schools that encourage children discovery and participation, she found that several years later, by the end of the fourth grade, those who had received more didactic-based education earned significantly lower grades than those who had been allowed to learn through play. Children’s progress “may have been slowed by overly academic preschool experiences that introduced formalized learning experiences too early for most children’s developmental status,” Dr. Marcon wrote in her study according to The New York Times.
The idea is that before thinking of enrolling your kid in a summer school so you can feel good that your kid is doing something useful of his/her time instead of playing, you may want to check the programs offered in these school and how they are catered to your kid’s psychological needs. “Play is often perceived as immature behavior that doesn’t achieve anything,” says David Whitebread, a psychologist at Cambridge University who has studied the topic for decades. “But it’s essential to their development. They need to learn to persevere, to control attention, to control emotions. Kids learn these things through playing.”
