Getting Smarter Sooner

Getting Smarter Sooner A moppet in kindergarten recites his ABCs, then confesses to his parents: "I learned it on Sesame Street, but my teacher thinks she taught me." It is not only young children who are ahead of themselves--or rather, ahead of the level where the traditional curriculum considers they should be. High school seniors also often find themselves bored to death, and even more bored when they discover that their freshman year in college repeats much of what they have already learned.

Tests show, in fact, that high school seniors are now as well informed as college freshmen were 20 years ago. Educators credit this development chiefly to television, which conveys a much larger amount of information to the young outside school hours than they have ever received before. In some ways, such acceleration is making young people too smart too soon.

Less Junglegym. To meet this problem, Wilson Riles, the man who ousted Archconservative Max Rafferty as California's superintendent of public instruction in last fall's elections, has a plan. He would start all of California's 4,408,000 public school children a year before the present kindergarten age of five. They would begin much of first-grade work in kindergarten instead of spending so much time on blocks and Junglegym.

Adolescents would be graduated a corresponding year earlier, moving on at the age of 17 to jobs, college or a year off to reconnoiter their futures. It is a proposal of such staggering simplicity that it is already meeting opposition. Teachers object that it could require them to retrain in order to teach younger children. Blue-collar parents worry that the plan would throw even more jobseekers into competition for already scarce work. In fact, however, the idea of an accelerated curriculum has been endorsed by the Carnegie Commission on Higher Education (TIME, Dec. 7), and is under consideration in several states, including Rhode Island and New York.

Shock the Mind. Discussing his program in a recent Los Angeles Times column, Riles argued that the state laws barring children from kindergarten until they are nearly five years old derive from the solicitous but outmoded notion of "readiness." That idea held that it is unwise to "shock the young mind with intensive instruction until it is ready --perhaps at age six or seven." The twelve-year curriculum became widespread by the 1890s, Riles adds, as "a gift of America to mass education. At a time when relatively few went to college, extra years of school free of charge were indeed a blessing." Now, however, "our youngsters are more ready than the schools are."

Riles would pay the preschool bills with money now spent on the twelfth grade, upending "the current inverted pyramid shape of school finance, where the lower the grade, the less money per pupil is spent." The biggest gainers, he thinks, might be disadvantaged students --and the taxpayers. "Prevention is cheaper than remediation," he says. "A dollar spent on the very young goes farther than a dollar for the not-so-young who are in remedial classes or on welfare or, indeed, on the 'Wanted' bulletins of post office walls."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.