Academic or Intellectual

In the book developed at the Working Forum for Teacher Educators in Auckland, New Zealand, Conversations on Early Childhood Teacher Education, Lilian Katz discussed her concerns about the distinction between academic and intellectual goals for the education of young children….

“During the last few decades in several countries there has been increasing pressure on preschool programs to introduce children to basic literacy and numeracy skills, commonly referred to as academic instruction.  Furthermore, increasing emphasis on testing children has intensified the pressure on preschool programs to prepare children for subsequent schooling, pushing down earlier and earlier what probably should not even be done later.  In other words, academic goals are those focused on getting children ready for formal school-related skills and exercises.  These are the kinds of things that can be correct or incorrect.  The children must attend to the teacher to memorize the correct answers and correct behaviors and skills.  These are also activities and skills that must be practiced with exercises, for example, learning the alphabet, capital or lower case letters, handwriting, or the rules of punctuation.

“Nobody argues against such learning — ultimately.  But there are many arguments, at least in some countries, about at what ages such instruction should be introduced.  There are several important things to consider about when is the best time to learn them, as well as about the best ways to learn them.  The evidence that we do have — and we certainly need more — is that earlier mastery of academic skills is not necessarily better, especially for boys....

“On the other hand, intellectual goals refer to children’s inborn dispositions to make sense of their experience, to theorize, analyze, synthesize, predict, hypothesize, and try to understand cause-effect relationships, and other similar activities of the mind.  It is for this reason that I suggest that young children should be involved in investigations in which their growing active minds can be fully engaged.

“... I have observed over and over again that young children who are intellectually engaged in worthwhile investigations, begin to ask for help in using academic skills — for example, writing and counting, in the service of their intellectual goals.”

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