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The 30th Anniversary issue of Exchange (March 2008; www.ChildCareExchange.com) included a very special Beginnings Workshop section on "School Readiness" with articles by Nancy Carlsson-Paige, David Elkind, Lilian Katz, and Marjorie Kostelnik. In this section, Lilian Katz, who is the lead-off speaker at the Working Forum for Teacher Educators observed...

"Many of those involved in policy decision-making assume that the early childhood curriculum consists largely either of spontaneous play or formal academic instruction. It is, however, important to keep in mind that these are not the only two options for the preschool curriculum. Furthermore, that while both play and instruction can have a place in the curriculum, both positions overlook the importance of children’s intellectual development. To highlight the contrasts, academic goals are those concerned with acquiring small discrete bits of disembedded information, usually related to pre-literacy skills, and practiced in drills, worksheets, and other kinds of exercises designed to prepare them for later literacy and numeracy learning. The items learned and practiced require correct answers, rely heavily on memorization, and consist largely of giving the teacher the correct answers that the children know she wants. These bits of information are essential components of reading and other academic competencies. The issue here is not whether academic skills matter; rather it is when they matter. Intellectual goals and their related activities, on the other hand, address the life of the mind in its fullest sense, including a range of aesthetic and moral sensibilities. The formal definition of the concept of intellectual emphasizes reasoning, hypothesizing, predicting, the development and analysis of ideas, and the quest for understanding.

"With the intellectual dispositions in mind, an appropriate curriculum in the early years is one that encourages and motivates children to seek mastery of basic academic skills (e.g., beginning writing skills), in the service of their intellectual pursuits. In this way, the children should be able to sense the purposefulness of the activities and their efforts to find things out. While intellectual dispositions may be weakened or even damaged by excessive and premature formal instruction, they are also not likely to be strengthened by many of the trivial, if not banal (e.g., refrigerator art?), activities frequently offered in early childhood settings.

"I suggest that when young children engage in projects in which they conduct investigations of significant objects and events around them and for which they have developed the research questions to find out things like how things work, what things are made of, what people around them do to contribute to their well-being, and so forth, their minds are fully engaged. Furthermore, the usefulness and importance of being able to read, write, measure, and count gradually becomes self-evident."

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"School Readiness" and all other 85 Beginnings Workshop sets are now on sale for only $5 each. Beginnings Workshops address the following curriculum areas:

• Child Development
• Program Development
• Professional Development
• Language and Literacy
• Curriculum Issues
• Environments
• Parents

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