LEARNING YOUR COLORS

A six month old child will not speak. No matter how hard you try to teach him/her to speak the baby is not developmentally prepared for language acquisition and he/she will not speak. A one year old will not learn their colors. No matter how many colors you put in front of him/her the baby will not be able to identify colors. No matter how much time you spend going over colors a one year old will not learn to identify colors because their brain is not developmentally ready to learn colors. Two year olds will not play interactively together. They play side by side because that is the developmental stage they are at. Why do present day Common Core creators think that all brain development restrictions disappear when a child is three years old, or five years old ?

The new early childhood standards, as I have mentioned on this blog before, require higher level analytical thinking of 3 year olds. They also require scientific and algebraic reasoning to be taught to these 3 year olds. They are also going to learn the planets and that buildings are engineered. Why would you write standards like this for babies? Any person who works with three year olds, or any person who has a modicum of common sense, would know that these standards are nonsense. This is like thinking that if you start your baby on reading skills in the cradle he/she will learn to read earlier and be a better reader.  This is not going to happen. Learning will happen when the student is developmentally ready to accept and use the information.

Before the current push into preschool, the Common Core geniuses (self appointed) produced the English/ Language Arts standards for k-12. In those standards five year olds will spend their time discussing their opinions with one another and comparing different stories. This is teaching the baby in the cradle to read again. Not only are five year olds not developmentally ready to extract and synthesize information while coming up with conclusions that they can defend with facts, the time that they are spending doing things that are of no value to them, is time they should be spending doing more concrete things that they are ready for like actually learning their letters and numbers and playing with their peers. Five year olds are discoverers, they need to be able to play with concrete things and work with clay and sand and so on.

It's wrong for the Federal Government or their supported central authority to force schools to do their bidding, whether you want to call it a curriculum or not. No central authority is so smart that they know what every school in America should be teaching in every grade. This group of yo yo's is particularly off course, but even if they were closer to a good curriculum, should they have the right to force a particular type of learning into our schools? This is what dictators do. This is certainly what they did in the Soviet Bloc. In America our teachers should be allowed to pick instructional materials and curriculums and teaching strategies from a myriad of private sources.

Under this system of choice, like under capitalism, bad ideas will die almost immediately and good ideas will be used and blossom. Teachers of many years are better teachers because they know what is tried and true. They have experienced things that don't work and perfected those things that do work. This is where curriculum decision making should take place, at the school level. Companies that write textbooks do this as a full time job. As they try to do well in their business they should be trying to be the best at what they do so that the teachers will choose their materials. They should not be successful by conforming to central authorities, bureaucracies. Good schools and good curriculums are not created by bureaucrats, they are created in the free forum of the schools.

As we all know, programs that are created by bureaucrats take on a life of their own and they are very hard to get rid of. No matter how bad they are, they just go on and on. That is what is happening in our schools. The whole child concept has been a complete and utter failure but the school boards go on following these programs and mandates as their schools fall lower and lower in academic success. We used to have excellent schools in Helena. Today we are at the bottom in comparison to other AA schools in the state. The whole child concept was innitiated under Goals 2000 (Hillary Clinton) in the early nineties. More than twenty years later our schools are struggling more than ever, yet no one will admit, or even look at the fact, that the whole child concept is a failure. The schools were doing better before all their whole child concept programs. The whole child concept nonsense said that children couldn't learn when they were hungry. Well, they've found out that the problem in school was obiviously not that children were hungry.

This country was built with the ideas that the Democrats say the Republicans don't have. This country
 was built with students in rows and using direct instruction. Maybe everything wasn't perfect, but it was better than what is happening today!! Good change comes slowly and it doesn't come from bureaucrats.Change comes from hard work and trial and error.America needs to get rid of bureaucrats and put their trust in themselves. Students will LEARN THEIR COLORS and everything else they should know better when America goes back to freedom instead of bureaucratic top down control.