“Keep anxiety at bay,” was the subject line of last week’s email from the Family Institute at Northwestern University. The magnitude of the task can’t be overstated. One of the monsters has come out of the closet, and he will soon live in a big white house built by slaves. …
Play, the primary engine of human development, is vanishing. Melvin Konner, an anthropologist and neuroscientist, regards it as the central paradox of evolutionary biology, combining great energy and risk for an activity that seems pointless. But pointless it’s not. The positive emotions evoked by interactions, physical exercise, and mastery of …
Suddenly, everyone’s weighing in on what young children need. From CEOs of tech startups to the titans of philanthropcapitalism, from economists to journalists and political pundits, early development and education have become a free-for-all, the province of those whose expertise lies elsewhere. Enter, Erika Christakis, author of The Importance of …
I recently learned that Harriet Cuffaro had left us. Suddenly, I was back on the classroom floor at Bank Street College of Education, where she taught for three decades. Well past childhood, we were deep into block building, one of the most rigorous assignments I encountered in graduate school. Cuffaro, …
These are dark times for the children in the garden. They have lost their place at the center of education. The shepherds of early development are struggling to move them in from the periphery. But the task is daunting, efforts thwarted in the age of standards-based accountability. Teaching Kindergarten: Learner …
The subject line was irresistible: “Early Childhood Pushes Up.” The Teachers College Record, a hotbed of radical critique, had delivered another gem to my inbox. Here was a scathing commentary on Obama’s “Cradle-to-Career” education policy. “Wish you hadn’t moved to Australia,” I emailed Jeanne Marie Iorio, a senior lecturer at …
Earlier this year, Robert Pondiscio, a policy pundit at the Fordham Institute, took to his “Common Core” blog and blasted Reading in Kindergarten: Little to Gain and Much to Lose, a report written by three early childhood educators. Why shouldn’t kids be reading in kindergarten, the man wanted to know. …
Ruby Takanishi, who presided over the Foundation for Child Development for many years, sends me small gifts. In a recent email with the subject line “Favorites,” I clicked on the link to a TED talk by Takaharu Tezuka about a kindergarten that he and his wife and partner, Yui, renovated …
