My trophy wife hits the nail on the
head more than she misses. Because it is my duty as
head of the household to point out the nails she
does miss, she would make the trophy wife hall of
fame if she accepted my helpful corrections.
Surprisingly, she doesn’t. (The thought police
reading my column just spilled their lattes and I
just love screwing with the haters.) Druann teaches
high school math, has raised three children, four if
you count me, and has 13 grandchildren on the ground
with two more due in 2015. She spent nine summers
cooking for our cattle drive business, which means
she fed around 30 real and pretend cowboys using a
Dutch oven and a shovel in whatever misery Mother
Nature tossed at us. All of the above made her an
expert at adolescent psychology, so I listened
closely when she weighed in on early childhood
education; the latest sleight-of-hand the ruling
class is proposing to control the unwashed.
To become a collectivist utopia the government must
indoctrinate children before age six, so in 2007,
progressives enacted full-day kindergarten in
Montana. As this was just the beginning, President
Obama pushed for even earlier childhood education in
his State of the Union Address in February of 2013.
To raise a population of subservient, mind-numbed
worker bees with great self-esteem, leftists spew
imaginary facts claiming children become more
well-rounded adults if they are raised by the
authority. The hard data disputes their
state-sponsored lie.
When I asked my trophy wife if she supported pre-K
education she said, “Only if they have a dirt pile.”
With many educators heralding I-pads as the Bible of
today’s electronic vortex, I found it odd she
advocated dirt piles. If you don’t know, a dirt pile
is simply a pile of dirt on which little ones can
build roads, caves, tunnels, forts, reservoirs and
recreate battle scenes with toy soldiers. The
possibilities are limited only by their creativity
and extensive studies reviewed in the May issue of
Psychology Today proves the trophy wife is correct;
proper adolescent development is all about the
self-directed play such as five-year-olds crawling
around the dirt pile.
Early childhood education comes in two forms, the
first being direct-instruction (DI). Like
waterboarding mini-terrorists, DI children are force
fed worksheet exercises to prep them for
standardized testing. The second form, play-based
instruction, cultivates self-directed thought,
problem solving and conflict resolution. Here is how
the two methods compare in real life. In the 1970s,
German researchers showed “by grade four the
children from the direct-instruction kindergartens
performed significantly worse than those from the
play-based kindergartens on every measure.” A
similar study focusing on high poverty students in
Michigan in 1967 found even more alarming results.
By age 23, the lives of students subject to
direct-instruction kindergarten were a train wreck,
having felony arrest records three times higher than
those experiencing traditional, play-focused
kindergarten. Collectivists may have concealed the
data for 25 years, but then came Baltimore and
Ferguson.
Over the Mothers’ Day, my three children, their
spouses and my 13 grandchildren celebrated the
weekend with us. It was absolute chaos. There were
sippy-cups spilled in every corner of the house
caused by a never ending Nerf-gun battle and this
was before the grandkids joined the action. Once
booted outside in the rain, if the wee ones weren’t
paddling around the pond in the kayak, or hunting
rabbits, they were harvesting willows and building
the mother of all forts. My descendants are raised
country kids accustomed to self-directed play in
barns, shops, ponds and brush patches. This brings
me to my point. America’s future depends on whether
progressives love their children more than they love
the collective, because the second can only be
advanced at the expense of the first. Families be
damned, their true allegiance is to the state.
|