Posted on 08/09/2005 9:45:12 PM PDT by manny613
I recently wrote about how I think today's parents are too intense when it comes to kids and pre-school. I just think taking a 4-year-old to a specialist to work on scissor skills (a literal example I've seen in news reports on the subject more than once) is a little excessive.
(Excerpt) Read more at jewishworldreview.com ...
Cute article. Life was simpler when people didn't sue at the drop of a hat. I can remember playing at a friend's house. Her father was a welder and had designed some wonderful backyard playground equipment. In addition to the normal merry-go-round, teeter-totter, and other common equipment, there were some truly diabolical pieces which we were lucky to survive. Most of us ended up battered and bruised but wiser. Nowadays idiots are surviving way too long. In my day, the Darwin Rule was rampant but I don't recall any serious injuries from the equipment in that backyard.
As to early childhood education, I remember reading a long time ago about childhood education experiments in Russia. Back in the Cold War days when everything was a major competition between the East and the West, Russia (the USSR) decided that they would start educating their kids at age four instead of age five so the kids would be productive citizens one year earlier than ours. What they found was that when they started the kids learning too early, at about fourth grade or so, the kids suddenly stalled in their progress for about a year. Sort of a burnout for little kids. After a year they usually got back into the saddle but they discovered that starting education early did little to get a leg up on kids starting at age five. So I am leery of too much pressure on kids and I wonder if a lot of the education problems today aren't in reality little kid burnout.
I love this piece! Isn't it time to round up all the lawyers and send them to an island?? IMO, this country would be a whole lot better off and a whole lot happier without them.
Oh... And let's add a healthy number of shrinks and dingy educators along with them!
Then all we'd have to do is deprogram the neurotic mommies.
But....but....but....Hillary already told us it takes a village
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