Fanatic Fever Sidelines School Sandbox Set - Stand Up and Holler!

I've enjoyed a half-century of thrilling school sports -- personally I bleed orange and blue -- but I'm prepared to argue that it is immoral and degenerate (if not downright sick and twisted) to school little kids as if they were competitive commodities in big-money academic sports franchises.

September 11, 2006
NEWSWEEK Cover Story
The New First Grade: Too Much Too Soon
Among affluent families, the pressure to succeed at younger and younger ages is an inevitable byproduct of an increasingly competitive world. . .Parents are acutely aware of the pressure on their kids, but they're also creating it. . .
"There comes a time when prudent people begin to wonder just how high we can raise our expectations for our littlest schoolkids," says Walter Gilliam, a child-development expert at Yale University. Early education, he says, is not just about teaching letters but about turning curious kids into lifelong learners. It's critical that all kids know how to read, but that is only one aspect of a child's education.
. . . childhood takes time.

Giving little kids TIME to love reading and learning sounds great, doesn't it? But see how once again we twist general good into specific harm. As usual, we do it simply by misapplying force instead of respecting the individual. We love both nature and humans -- why such little love for the nature of little humans?

Ever heard of redshirting? It's a sort of "reverse head start" to the idea of academic preschool at obscenely tender ages to toughen their own kids up early for the rigors of school competition. But in redshirting, instead of a head start IN school, kids are kept out of competition longer to gain an edge by growing past the usual age, and then enter competition against younger and weaker peers. Weight-class wrestling and age-bracket recreation league teams define this as against the rules. Schools and colleges embrace it, at least when they think it works to the institution's competitive advantage and prestige, whether it helps the individual student or not.

So redshirting is a power play schools use in sports recruiting, to "artificially engineer the perfect" situation, to enhance a team's roster by locking up but then holding an individual player out of competition, sidelined in a (literally) red shirt, unable to play so that the player's year doesn't "count" competitively. The team hopes to get more advantage from him later at no cost, without losing either the chance to sign him or the player slot for the year. Supposedly the player gets an advantage too, an extra year to learn and mature, so when he does play later, he'll win more easily against relatively younger, relatively weaker competition.

Because competition IS relative by definition, the point of enforcing game rules is to insure that "level playing field" (the one we all claim to support over creating unfair advantage for our own partisans. Like cheating in voter registration games, but I digress . . .)

So when sanctioned rules allow any such manipulation, game theory teaches us that soon all rational players exercise it to the fullest, erasing any unfair relative advantage. This may elevate "The Game" overall yet not the players; in other words, competitive records and statistics for the best of the best can continue to rise in the aggregate, at the expense of the real people who arguably ARE the game. Competitive pressure to perform leads to many practices adverse to the interests of the individual engaging in them -- taking anabolic steroids and other dangerous drugs, or enduring repetitive concussions to play the game at its highest levels. Starving, stuffing, lying, cheating. Emotional and physical abuse of self and others in many forms. Using up and burning out one's talent, friends, family, money, time, privacy, and joie de vivre.

But back to redshirting as a competitive tactic -- did you know it's being used academically now, on toddlers and kindergarteners? Rob Reiner might object just because he wants all little kids in school ASAP, no time for the sandbox, but is he really such a winning academic coach? ("Meathead" is, and ought to be, a hard nickname to overcome in academe imo.) If I played team sports, I'd rather line up with "Engineering the Perfect Kindergarten" author Elizabeth Graue, University of Wisconsin-Madison professor in early childhood education and curriculum research.

What is research and practice about redshirting and retention all about? It might be about our response to variability in development and whether schools or individual children should bear the burden for responding to perceived deviations from the norm. It might be about whether kindergarten is about personal acceleration or the ecology of the group. It might be a vestige of kindergarten’s liminal position in the elementary school program, virtually universal but still officially optional.

Or it might be a metaphor for the forces of class in today’s society. Whatever it is, these practices are taken up in a context that now requires most kindergartners to read at some level by the end of the year, because that makes it more likely that they will be reading in first grade. This has kindergarten teachers bemoaning the lack of time available for play, and leads to hours dedicated to homework for five and six year olds.

The gaps between research and practice that make it so easy for parents, teachers, and policymakers to support redshirting and retention will remain until we make kindergarten a place for all children, not just those who try to engineer the perfect kindergarten. Shouldn’t we want more for Jamel, Justin, and Alex?

Are you really that shocked? Would you do it yourself as a parent, to help your own little son or daughter? Do you still think our entrenched and competitive public system of school games is a level playing field worthy of us as Thinking Parents or advantageous for our society?

Is it really the right way to teach future generations of Americans (on whom we as elders will depend) that what matters most is not winning or losing, but how we play the Game?

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