Achtung Baby

by Sara Zaske

  When I asked her about academic skills, Ulrike did say that children entering school should know how to at least write their names and how to count from one to twenty, but even these relatively modest goals were mostly taught through hands-on projects—projects that were usually determined by the students themselves.

  Faster or Better Learning

  We Americans are notorious for wanting to hurry our children’s development. The Swiss psychologist Jean Piaget famously called this “the American question”—whether it is possible to speed up children’s acquisition of cognitive milestones, a goal which Piaget thought was dubious. In a 1970 interview with Psychology Today, he answered this question with another: “Is it a good thing to accelerate the learning of these concepts?”

  Good or not, many child experts don’t think it’s possible to push children to another stage before they are ready. “Development happens,” my pediatrician once told me. “You can’t force it, and you can’t really stop it either.” The child expert Remo Largo has a favorite proverb that embodies this idea: “The grass doesn’t grow faster if you pull it.”

  Yet we Americans can’t seem to resist pushing and pulling our children to make cognitive achievements earlier and earlier. Piaget first observed this American desire in the 1970s. I can only imagine what he would think about what we are doing now.

  The U.S. Common Core academic standards include more than ninety literacy and math skills—for kindergartners. This means five- and six-year-old children are expected to learn things like basic addition and subtraction and to read emergent texts. Common Core proponents argue that these skills are achievable and should be learned through playlike activity rather than using things like worksheets. Robert Pondiscio, a senior fellow with the Thomas Fordham Institute, has pointed out that the standards don’t call for turning kindergartens into academic pressure cookers: “Nothing in Common Core—not one blessed thing—precludes schools and teachers from creating safe, warm, nurturing classrooms that are play-based, engaging, and cognitively enriching.”

  He may be right that it is possible, but the rush to acquire these skills also begs Piaget’s question—is it a good thing? Even if the children have the ability, it’s hard to believe that every single five-year-old child is ready and willing to learn ninety cognitive skills without heavy-handed teacher intervention and without sacrificing something else.

  After years of speculation about what was happening to early childhood education, University of Virginia researchers decided to look into whether American kindergarten had truly become the new first grade. They evaluated data collected from thousands of kindergarten and first-grade teachers between 1998 and 2010. Their report, which came out in early 2016, found that not only were kindergarten teachers spending a greater amount of time teaching math and reading—with an increased use of textbooks and workbooks—but also that less class time was spent on things like music and art. Also, the number of teachers who spent at least one hour a day on child-selected activities dropped as did the likelihood that a classroom had discovery or play areas. “We were surprised to see just how drastic the changes have been over a short period of time,” said Daphna Bassok, the lead author of the study. “We expected to see changes on some of these dimensions but not nearly so systematically and not nearly of this magnitude.”

  The study is proof of what child development experts such as Nancy Carlsson-Paige have been warning for years: that the pressure of high-stakes testing has extended to kindergarten. Carlsson-Paige, a professor emerita of education at Lesley University, said kindergartens and even publicly funded preschools have moved toward more direct drill-and-grill–style teaching as a result of the testing reforms that punish schools and teachers if students perform poorly. It has become “a threatening and punitive climate because teachers feel the pressure to get those scores,” she said.

  And Carlsson-Paige has witnessed how this pressure gets passed on to the children. “In some classrooms I’ve visited, I’ve seen the horrible constraints children are under, and they’re completely disinterested,” she said. “You can see them turning off when they are five years old.”

  What’s worse, the sacrifice American kindergartens have made is in pursuit of a goal that has questionable value. For example, there has yet to be any significant scientific study that shows learning to read at an early age has any benefit. In fact, a 2010 study done by Sebastian Suggate, a New Zealand native who now works at the University of Regensburg in Germany, showed that children who first learned to read at age five had no advantage over children who had learned to read at age seven. By the time both groups in the study were eleven, the late readers were indistinguishable from the early readers.

  Many American kindergartens and preschools used to follow an emergent curriculum, which is similar to the German situationansatz we found at our Berlin kita. That type of curriculum can still be found at private preschools and kindergartens, but as the University of Virginia study showed, public schools have abandoned that play-based, child-centered curriculum in favor of more formal didactic instruction—and the trend was even more pronounced at schools that served predominantly low-income and minority students.

  One big thing that American parents can do to help our kids’ long-term success is to find a play-based preschool. We can interview our children’s prospective kindergarten teachers as well. Many do their best to resist the academic pressure put on kids at these early ages. Parents have the power to take the pressure off at home too. You can politely refuse to have your child do homework.

  To help everyone’s children, we should advocate to end the push of academics into kindergarten. Defending the Early Years, a nonprofit Carlsson-Paige helps advise, has many tool kits to help parents organize. You can speak with your principal. Write your school board and government representatives. Find ways to join together with other parents. Personal actions are good, but individual parents often find the inertia in many districts hard to fight alone. Be like the Germans and start a stammtisch, a regular table, at a coffee shop to meet up with other parents and discuss school issues every week. You can also use organizing groups like Parents Across America to help elevate your voice. You can run for the PTA to make it a more active organization, or better yet, run for school board. It will take a sustained effort of many people and using the elected channels of power to make a real difference.

  Somehow German kitas and kindergartens escaped the academic pressures, and they provide a good illustration of what our early childhood education system could be. Like the United States, Germany has fallen prey to what they call “academic shocks”—the sudden fear that their kids are falling behind the rest of the world. Each shock in Germany has been followed by huge political debate over educational reform. Yet there was strong resistance to any effort to push academics into kindergarten, fueled in part by the antiauthoritarian sentiments many Germans still hold.

  In the 1970s, the German government commissioned the Deutsche Jugendinstitut (German Youth Institute) to develop a “social-learning curriculum” for early education, and this eventually gave rise to the situation approach that was adopted nationwide and can still be found in many public kitas and kindergartens.

  The durability of the situation approach is perhaps a testament to its benefits and its basis in solid research. Critics of the Common Core regularly point out that the standards for earlier grades were made without input from early childhood education researchers. Also, as author Paul Tough details in his book How Children Succeed, a growing body of research shows that ultimately the children who go on to do well in school and in life are not necessarily the ones who master cognitive tasks but those who develop a “very different set of qualities, a list that includes persistence, self-control, curiosity, conscientiousness, and self-confidence.” He points out that people have different names for these qualities: “non-cognitive skills,” “personality traits,” or, more generally, “character.” I might call them kita skills, because these are the same qualities o
ur German kita taught my children, and in a most interesting way: by helping the children teach themselves.

  Children in Charge

  A wonderful thing happens when you let small children decide what they want to learn. They become intensely engaged.

  At our kita, learning was almost always directed by the children. Sometimes the teachers would notice a hot topic being discussed by the children. For instance, when the World Cup came around, rather than fight it, the teachers created a project around fussball (“soccer”). However, most of the time, the children chose the topic directly. It would start with a morning circle when the kita teachers asked the children for project ideas. Of course, some of the topics the children came up with didn’t work well. Some would be too broad like “animals” or too specific to hold the whole group’s interest for several weeks. One of the first projects Sophia suggested was “the human heart.” Not many of the other children were ready to back her idea, but when the teacher suggested they widen the topic to the human body, suddenly the rest of the kids were on board. They wanted to know how their muscles worked. What did the brain look like? How do the eyes see? The ears listen?

  At the start of the project, the children would list all the questions they wanted to answer and state what they already knew about the topic. Over the next weeks, the kids would explore their subject through books, film, and art projects. Sometimes, they would go on field trips to get information, such as to a museum, and other times, they’d invite a guest expert to visit. For the body project, a doctor came in to answer questions from the children.

  While my two children were in kita, their classes did projects on outer space, music, underwater life, jungles, and a number of places, including New York City and Egypt. One of my personal favorites was playgrounds, which involved the children visiting all the playgrounds within walking distance of the kita. (The child who suggested this project must have been a budding genius.)

  No matter what the project was, the kids were excited and engaged because they had ownership of the subject; it wasn’t forced on them by a teacher. The only goals to achieve were the ones they set for themselves. The child who had the original idea had an extra feeling of leadership and pride. I know Sophia did. One day she brought home a full-size picture of herself that had been traced on butcher paper and that she had painted. She proudly pointed out parts of the body and told me what she knew about them.

  It was clear that the projects encouraged the children’s curiosity. They built self-confidence by giving the children the control, choosing what to learn, and finding out how to answer their own questions. The projects also helped them learn a measure of self-control, learning how to concentrate for extended periods of time. The one thing they did not necessarily teach was good behavior—that was another issue entirely.

  Discipline

  The garden of our kita was a wild place, especially at the end of the day when there could be thirty or more kids tearing around the play structures.

  Our kita approached most rules the same way they approached projects: with some guidance, they let the students make the rules. I witnessed some of these sessions when the teachers asked the kids, “What should the rules of our room be?”

  For the most part, the kids already knew what they should do. “Put the toys away when you are done!” “No hitting!” “Don’t stand on the tables!”

  “Why?” the teacher asked. “Why not stand on the tables?”

  “You could fall off and get hurt!”

  “Und we don’t want stinky füsse where we eat!” another child said in mixed German and English. The room erupted in laughter.

  “I want to come back to ‘no hitting,’ ” the teacher said. “Why shouldn’t you hit?”

  Again, the kids had easy answers. “It hurts!” “They might hit you back,” and “They won’t play with you anymore.”

  The last answer was perhaps the most powerful. The kita teachers never forced children to play with each other or to “get along” if they didn’t. They also never punished them. As I mentioned earlier, Germans have rejected authoritarian ways of handling children. Corporal punishment, spanking, or hitting children whether by teachers or parents is against the law.

  Even more, I’ve rarely even heard a German mother raise her voice at a child, and I’ve never heard an angry reprimand from a kita teacher—not once, even though they deal with groups of eighteen or more energetic young children every day.

  Our kita’s philosophy was that the kids themselves were the best ones to enforce their own rules and solve their own conflicts—that they learn best from each other what is socially acceptable behavior. The teachers took an observational approach in this as well. Sometimes they would pull children aside if things got physical or too intense and talk with them, but rarely did they interfere in their everyday arguments.

  I can’t say that I always agreed with this philosophy, and I wasn’t alone. At the international kita, I found common discomfort among many of the other English-speaking parents, who worried about the free-for-all attitude, especially in the kita’s yard or garden. “It’s totally Lord of the Flies!” an Australian mother remarked to me once. I agreed.

  Now that she could make herself understood, Sophia had managed to avoid most conflicts at her new kita. We were relieved to know she wasn’t a natural hitter. She remained tight friends with Mariam and Emma with only some mild arguments. Mariam, the oldest, was clearly the leader, but she “graduated” the following year, and a new little girl came into the group, a German New Zealander also named Emma. Both the Emmas were the same age, and both were bright, fun girls with strong wills. Sophia soon learned the problem with having two friends like this. When the two Emmas fought, usually over what all three of them would play, Sophia was stuck in the middle and given the impossible task of picking a side or face losing one friend or the other.

  My best advice—“Just walk away” or “Don’t play with them if they are mean”—was only met with tears. Luckily, the kita teachers had some better strategies. “We guided them, we observed what the problem was, what each of them wanted,” Annika told me. “We did a lot of talking, a lot of mirroring with the kids, asking, ‘How do you think the other girl feels when this happens?’ They looked at the consequences, and then we let them solve the problems. If they said, ‘I don’t want to play with her,’ we needed to accept this. Maybe tomorrow, or ten minutes later, it would change.”

  Annika’s approach wasn’t an instant fix by any means. The arguments came and went for months, but Sophia learned from this process so well that by the time she reached elementary school, she was an expert at conflict resolution. At our first parent meeting, her first-grade teacher called Sophia a “sunshine girl” who “spreads peace wherever she goes.” As proud as I am of her, I know Sophia did not get that skill from me. I’m a little shorter on patience than I would like to be, and I would give my left arm for Sophia not to inherit that problem. That she doesn’t have my temper is part nature—despite a few toddler disputes, Sophia has always tended toward gentleness—but it is also part nurture. Controlling her temper, and dealing with those of others, was a skill she learned from her kita teachers.

  It took me a long time to realize that children, even very young ones, need adults other than their parents, that we parents are limited by our own characters and experiences in what we can teach our kids. Of course, these other adults—teachers, relatives, neighbors, and friends—can never take the place of parents, but they can teach our children things that we parents can’t. And sometimes, children need to be away from the strong influence of their parents to help establish themselves—even if they are only three or four.

  Kita Trips

  Before moving to Germany, I would have never considered letting my small children stay somewhere overnight without me. Soon after moving, I learned that from a young age German children try out übernachten (“overnights”) with grandparents, other friends, and even at their kita.

  At Sophia’s first
kita, just before she turned four, a new, very enthusiastic (and very tattooed) young kita instructor offered to take all the kids to a camp for two nights. Another teacher would come along, as well as a parent chaperone, for fifteen kids. This made me, as well as many of the German parents, nervous. It was a voluntary experience, but nearly all the parents agreed to let the children try it. Sophia was excited to go. After talking it over with another mother, Judith, whose daughter was friends with Sophia, we agreed to the trip. The two girls would have each other, we thought. Still, we had our phones ready and mapped out how to get to the camp for what we expected would be a middle-of-the-night phone call to pick up our stressed-out daughters. The phone call never came.

  After the second day, I rushed to the kita to pick up Sophia, worried that I would be met with tears. On the walk to the kita through the path in Treptower Park, I saw a lovely sight ahead of me: a string of kids holding hands with their two teachers, singing songs as they walked. Sophia was on the end next to her sleepy friend. When I caught up with them, Sophia babbled to me all about her adventures, which sounded pretty much like any day at kita except longer: “We read books. We played in the garden. We had all these bouncy balls!” Then I took her home, and she fell asleep and slept for twelve hours straight.

  At her new international kita, the children had an overnight in the building itself. They played games, took a tour of the neighborhood, and had a disco party. Still no phone call home, but she slept well that time (thanks, I assume, to the disco dancing).

  Writing on the parenting site Mobile-elternmagazine, German psychologist Gisela Preuschoff calls the first overnight separation for children “a psychological achievement.” I particularly like how she describes handling this difficult milestone: “… fear also helps us grow, if we learn to overcome it. Letting go and hanging on belong together in life like the ebb and flow of the tides. Again and again, we encounter some situations where we have to hold on, and others where we have to let go.”