Don't Be Afraid. Let Your Children Play.

My friend who writes under the name Floor Pie on her brilliant namesake blog took exception to one of the premises in a recent post about the dangers of lectures, flash-cards, testing, and other hardcore "academic" practices in preschool, for which I laid blame on corporate-style education reformers. She is more inclined to see the fault in parents:

(T)eaching them tricks to impress their parents . . ." Yep. I don't know that ed reform is to blame at the preschool level for this. The consumers practically demand it. Ever worked at our co-op table at a Seattle preschool fair? Parents are asking for flash cards and academics and getting baby ready for crushing all the other babies academically. And the rat race attitude is infectious.

I'm lucky in that by the time parents get to me, they've already at least partially bought into the whole progressive, play-based thing. It doesn't, however, surprise me to learn that there are still parents out there who haven't heard the good word, although we're doing our best here. Every single bit of genuine research supports the primacy of free play in how young children learn best, including every media report that digs deeper than a press release, including the Scientific American article I referenced in that post, which reveals that the lectures/flash-card/testing regime can actually cause brain damage. That's right -- brain damage. Anyone who makes a conscientious effort to explore what is best for their young child will easily discover this, yet some sizable portion of parents apparently still go to preschool fairs looking for the kind of education that corporate reformers are selling. Why is that? I think it's manufactured fear.

In fairness, the Scientific American article focused on parents as well, framing their story with a father wearing a seersucker suit who was hugely impressed that his 4-year-old daughter knew about the species of whales she saw on TV, the implication being that these aren't working class parents we're talking about, if only because of the tuitions they're paying for the privilege. These are people with college degrees, upper middle class even, people who should know better. And the only thing I know that can make grown-up people act against their best interests like this, short of coercion, is good marketing.

My college degree is in journalism with an emphasis in advertising. I was planning to start my career as an advertising copywriter, with a goal of working my way up to creative director, and worked for several years in public relations, both with an agency and later for the Greater Seattle Chamber of Commerce. I don't claim to be a marketing expert (gladly, I managed to escape the profession relatively young) but I have made enough of a study of it to know that among the strongest "persuasive" messages are those that evoke fear. 

And this is where the corporate-reformers come in, if nothing else, these folks who are well versed in the tactics of business, including, of course marketing. This is how it works. They aren't so ham-fisted as to run flashy television ads. Instead they are funding "research" through a network of organizations with earnest-sounding names like Center for American Progress, Brookings Institute, Thomas B. Fordham Institute, Foundation for Excellence in Education, Progressive Policy Institute, National Council on Teacher Quality, and the notorious Americans for Prosperity. These think-tanks go through the motions of pretending to do actual research, often by cherry-picking data from legitimate studies, then issuing reports to much fanfare that include conclusions pre-determined by the policies favored by those who fund them (like Bill Gates or the Koch brothers). 

Public relations professionals then go to work "selling" stories to the media, using hooks designed to invoke fear about the "dire state" of education or the fact that we're falling behind the Chinese or that lazy unionized teachers are standing in the way of progress. Pretty much anything to cause parents (or as Floor Pie calls them "consumers") to feel a sense of panic about their own children. The press runs with these sensationalistic story lines which come complete with nice tidy "solutions" like more high-stakes standardized testing, more flash cards, more lectures, more homework, larger classes, charter schools and de-professionalized teachers: not coincidentally the exact menu of policies favored by their paymasters.

Their lobbyists, then, reports in hand and reams of press clippings to "support" them, head into the offices of our elected officials and "sell" them on their pre-determined policies, the very ones that can cause brain damage. They, in turn, come up with schemes like No Child Left Behind (Bush administration) and Race To The Top (Obama administration) designed around these think-tank propaganda pieces, feeding another round of the-sky-is-falling publicity.

And it goes beyond this. As a person who blogs about early childhood education, I'm a regular recipient of serious sounding missives, offering me the "opportunity" to inform my readers about this or that latest think-tank report. When I write back asking for documentation or if it is peer reviewed, I don't get a response. Frequently, I'm even rejecting comments from unknown readers who start by praising my work, then drop in such unsupported, yet authoritative claims like, "of course, the latest neuroscientific research indicates that children are born ready to read," and other such nonsense. Again, when I challenge them to support their claims, they can't because there is no evidence whatsoever to support what the corporate reformers are after. (It's my blog and I'm not interested in spreading disinformation, so I delete them.)

Movie makers (Waiting For Superman) and book publishers (Class Warfare: The Fight To Fix America's Schools) and others then jump on the bandwagon based on this pseudo-research, further feeding the cycle of fear. Alarmed parent-consumers, in turn, start hammering their local school boards. These parents then, naturally wanting their own child to get the "best education possible," based on the "research," show up a preschool fairs demanding lectures, flash-cards, and tests that will get their "baby ready to crush the other babies academically."

Lest you think I'm conjuring a conspiracy theory here, I want to be clear that I don't believe there is a cabal of billionaires meeting in secret to plot all of this. No, I think this is just how corporate types have learned to get their way when it comes to public policy. Tragically, it's how most legislation gets made in our country and it's the primary reason I support the Occupy Wall Street movement. 

This is how businesses have learned to create consumer demand for products we don't otherwise need or want. It's supply-side economics at work. This is how they sell things, even if those things cause brain damage.

Those of us on the side of actual research and experience, those who are wary of causing brain damage, those of us in the classrooms teaching the children, don't have think tanks, publicists, and other marketing machinery at our disposal. And I'm glad we don't. Instead we're doing it one parent at a time, delivering our simple, true message: Don't be afraid. Let your children play. 

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