School for Four-Year-Olds?

From eighth grade to high school and now into college, the educational expectancy of U.S. children has been expanding ever upward. Now the pressure is mounting to extend schooling two more years at the other end. Last month the Educational Policies Commission of the National Education Association proposed that "all children should have the opportunity to go to school at public expense beginning at the age of four." President Johnson promptly endorsed the idea, as did HEW Secretary John Gardner. With the Federal Government that committed, says one Washington educator, "the question is not whether --but when--it will come."

The idea is not new. The national P.T.A. has been urging earlier public schooling since 1898. The Federal Government financed nurseries to provide work for adult supervisors during the Depression and to free mothers for defense work in World War II. The current impetus to lower the school age stems from the general success--still largely statistical--of Project Head Start, which gave 560,000 "culturally disadvantaged" children from low income families eight weeks of preschool training last summer, will handle another 210,000 three-to-six-year-olds in a year-round program starting next fall.

Obsessed Parents. The N.E.A. report argues that income alone does not determine who can benefit by earlier schooling. Just as disadvantaged are "pampered" children or those whose parents "are obsessed with the need to impress and achieve" and "show them little love." For all children, says the report, the first four or five years of life are the period of most rapid mental growth in which "exposure to a wide variety of activities and of social and mental interactions greatly enhances a child's ability to learn."

University of Chicago Education Professor Benjamin S. Bloom, an N.E.A. consultant, contends that half of a 17-year-old's intelligence is developed by the time he is four, another 30% between four and eight. School at ages four and five, he feels, could help a child "develop his language ability and a longer attention span, give him skills in learning to learn and establish relationships with others."

Nonetheless, some experts question whether children from emotionally healthy homes would benefit much by earlier schooling. Dr. Abram Blau, head of child psychiatry at Manhattan's Mount Sinai Hospital, contends that "kids who are sent away from home before age five feel rejected." They also are generally too "self-interested" to either "socialize" or "pay attention to real learning," he argues. Superintendent Lester Ball of the Oak Park, Ill., schools believes that "the average suburban environment can be as good or better than a school" for a four-year-old.

Columbia Teachers College President John Fischer answers that "obviously a child needs its mother and its home, but a nursery school enlarges him--it doesn't divide him." Even when a neighborhood teems with kids, he argues, "without some help and understanding, a child who has difficulty getting along in the back yard is going to find his difficulty getting worse instead of better."

Although the experience of Montessori schools shows that surprisingly many four-year-olds can be taught to read and write, most advocates of early education believe that developing self-confidence and a fondness for school is more important than tackling academics earlier. Instead, they suggest that the early years be used for participation in the kind of art, rhythm, games and storytelling that is found in kindergartens--a suggestion that leads James Gradolf, psychologist for schools in Hamilton County, Ohio, to worry that the schools might "wind up as nothing more than professional baby sitters."

Washington Will Pay. What to teach the four-and five-year-olds may well be a simpler problem than finding the teachers and classrooms. Nearly half the nation's school districts do not now have kindergartens; across the U.S. about 5,000,000 more four-and five-year-olds would be added to school rolls. Most big urban school systems already rely heavily on part-time teachers. Colleges are just beginning to set up large-scale preschool teacher-training programs, and these specialists are rare.

With local taxes soaring, educators dread the thought of asking for money to operate two more grades, estimate that it would take at least $2.75 billion a year to handle the extra children even without building new classrooms. This means, in effect, that if Washington likes the idea of early schooling, Washington will probably have to pay for it. Already, Illinois Congressman Roman Pucinski has initiated legislation to provide $350 million next year as "seed money" to help states undertake early schooling for all.

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