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["clanSkeen" <sgian AT planetc.com>]

>From TVO's article:

> Classrooms should serve 3-, 4-, and 5-year-olds. Appropriate
> programs should also be provided for younger children.

Tvo, you are fond of saying that education works like any other business.
Think back on all the businesses whose reins you have held over the years
and tell us how they would have fared if they had been run as Mass is
running its education system.  When I was a child, there was no
Kindergarten.  As the education system fell into decay, K for 5 year olds
was added to get children ready for "real" school as six year olds.  Over
the years we've added K-4 to get them ready for K-5 and now K-3 to get them
ready for K-4.  The article you forward says that the system wants to start
even younger! What next?  Rip the infant off its mother's breast and take it
away to a 3 month old program for fear it won't be ready for the K-1
program?   Start the education process in utero?

Then along the way there are countless alternate and remedial programs
because despite robbing the craddle, the education still isn't successful.
Finally these children go to college and we find a large part still
functionally illiterate and must have classes on a middle school level to
continue as 19 year olds.

Since education is supposed to be operating like any other business, how
many of the businesses that you ran could have survived like this?  The
factory floor can't turn out the product so we start conditioning,
pre-manufacturing the product before it gets there.  The product is still
not functional so we have to have post-factory remediation for years
afterwards.

Tvo adds:

>Cost of early education is less than any alternative.  I don't care how
>the hell it is done, just do it.

Here is where you have tunnel vision.  The only solution you allow for the
problem is more teachers making more money.   Cost is less than ANY
alternative?  How are you coming up with this?   There are scores of
alternatives that are less costly and more effective.  They don't all
involve paying high salaries to PhD's and so they seem to slip completely
off your radar screen.

>From the article:


>Children learn about words and numbers, but they also develop behavioral
>skills such as sitting still and paying attention. Most important, early
>education should be an exciting experience that makes children eager to
>learn.

How can you read this and not see how sick it is?  Two and three year olds
will be indoctrinated to sit still and "pay attention" on demand (ie 'be
brainwashed') but most importantly it "should be an exciting experience that
makes children eager to learn."   Hello!!  Children are born eager to learn
until the instinct is beaten out of them by making them sit still and pay
attention!  Just sick.  And sicker still is that any child with the
fortitude and will to resist it will be declared to be ADD or ADHD or ODD or
ZYX and drugged out of his gourd until he too sits there like a zombie.
Utterly sick.


> Too many children enter kindergarten with the heartbreaking
>feeling that they won't be good at learning.

Eh ... the heartbreaking feeling that they too will not be a will-less,
mindless indoctrinated zombie.  We set this sick goal as the norm and then
make children feel bad about themselves if they don't submit to it.

James