Why our kids don't go to kindergarten

Like many home-schooling families, we saw an educational system plagued by tests, drills, busywork and flawed ideas
By Andrew O'Hehir
March 15, 2010

This is the third in a series. (Read the first installment here and the second installment here.)

About a year ago, a friend of my wife's was touring the kindergarten classroom at her local school, in a middle-class, racially mixed New York neighborhood. She noticed the lack of blocks, craft supplies, sand or water tables, a puppet theater -- things she remembered from her own year in kindergarten, long ago. The teacher shook his head firmly. "They played with that stuff in pre-K," he said. "In kindergarten, they're here to work."

I have no doubt that the teacher thought that was the right answer, and for some parents it might have been. Our friend ended up deciding to home-school her son, which is how Leslie, my wife, met her in the first place. But that isn't the moral of the story. One isolated anecdote has no larger social relevance, and, believe it or not, I don't mean to use it as an evangelical tool. the rest image