The Magic of Preschool

08/20/2010

Sometimes we conflate race with racism. I don’t think we should. Every day of my life, I’m going to wake up and be Black. Now, if that’s a hard or difficult thing, it has nothing to do with my blackness, it has to do with the environment that I’m in.
C. Davida Ingram, Artist

An article, "How does preschool work its magic?," in Wired magazine, reviews a new paper by Flavio Cunha, an economist at the University of Pennsylvania, and James Heckman, a Nobel Laureate at the University of Chicago, on the reasons to invest in preschool education. In the paper Cunha and Heckman discuss the findings of the Perry Preschool Study and the article summarizes....

"Interestingly, the Perry Preschool didn’t lead to a lasting boost in IQ scores. While kids exposed to preschool got an initial bump in general intelligence, this dissipated by second grade. Instead, preschool seemed to improve performance on a variety of 'non-cognitive' abilities, such as self-control, persistence, and grit. While society has long obsessed over raw smarts — just look at our fixation on IQ scores — Heckman and Cunha argue that these non-cognitive traits are often more important. They note, for instance, that dependability is the trait most valued by employers, while 'perseverance, dependability, and consistency are the most important predictors of grades in school.' Of course, these valuable skills have little or anything to do with general intelligence. And that’s probably a good thing, since our non-cognitive traits are much more malleable, at least when interventions occur at an early age, than IQ. Preschool might not make us smarter — our intelligence is strongly shaped by our genes — but it can make us a better person, and that’s even more important."

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