Let’s suppose your school takes the anti-Finnish approach. If you have options, you can try to switch to a school that focuses on brain-centered learning instead, a school that aims to develop inquisitive learners, not score seekers. You can step in if you feel homework is becoming onerous or if it’s unduly stressful for your child. Schools like to say they use evidence-based policies, so ask your principal for the evidence behind the school’s homework policy. Try using one of our favorite lines from Sara Bennett and Nancy Kalish’s book The Case Against Homework: “It’s not working for my child.” You’d be surprised by how willing teachers are to make adjustments if homework has really become a problem.
You can also give your kid a pass to just let it go. If a teacher is assigning too much homework, and interventions haven’t worked, you could talk through the pros and cons of just not doing it. Which is more important? His happiness and well-being, or his grade with this particular teacher? To us, the answer is clear.
Teach Kids When They’re Ready
Our friend Marie’s daughter Emily just entered kindergarten. Emily went to preschool, where the curriculum revolved around things like petting rabbits and making art out of macaroni noodles. Emily isn’t all that interested in learning how to read, but she loves to dance and sing and can play with Barbies for hours. Emily’s older sister, Frances, was reading well before she started kindergarten, and the difference between them worried Marie. Emily’s grandparents thought it was a problem, too, and hinted that perhaps she should be reading to Emily more often. When Marie talked to another mom about it, her friend shared the same concern about her own two daughters, wondering if it was somehow her fault for not reading to her younger daughter enough. Would these younger siblings be behind the moment they started kindergarten?
This scenario drives us crazy because it’s grounded in fear, competition, and pressure, not in science or reality. Not only are parents feeling undue pressure, but their kids are, too. The measuring stick is out, comparing one kid to another, before they even start formal schooling. Academic benchmarks are being pushed earlier and earlier, based on the mistaken assumption that starting earlier means that kids will do better later. We now teach reading to five-year-olds even though evidence shows it’s more efficient to teach them to read at age seven, and that any advantage gained by kids who learn to read early washes out later in childhood.17
What was once advanced work for a given grade level is now considered the norm, and children who struggle to keep up or just aren’t ready yet are considered deficient. Kids feel frustrated, embarrassed, and experience a low sense of control if they’re not ready to learn what they’re being taught.
The fact is that while school has changed, children haven’t. Today’s five-year-olds are no more fundamentally advanced than their peers were in 1925, when we started measuring such things. A child today can draw a square at the same age as a child living in 1925 (4½), or a triangle (5½), or remember how many pennies he has counted (up to twenty by age six). These fundamentals indicate a child’s readiness for reading and arithmetic. Sure, some kids will jump the curve, but children need to be able to hold numbers in their head to really understand addition, and they must be able to discern the oblique line in a triangle to recognize and write letters like K and R. The problem is that while children from the 1920s to the 1970s were free to play, laying the groundwork for key skills like self-regulation, modern kindergartners are required to read and write.
Brain development makes it easier to learn virtually everything (except foreign languages) as we get older. Work is always easier with good tools. You can build a table with a dull saw, but it will take longer, be less pleasant, and may ingrain bad building habits that are hard to break later on. One of the most obvious problems we see from rushed academic training is poor pencil grip. Holding a pencil properly is actually pretty difficult. You need to have the fine motor skills to hold the pencil lightly between the tips of the first two fingers and the thumb, to stabilize it, and to move it both horizontally and vertically using only your fingertips. In a preschool class of twenty we know of in which the kids were encouraged to write much too early, seventeen needed occupational therapy to correct the workarounds they’d internalized in order to hold a pencil. Think of it: 85 percent of kids needed extra help, parents spent extra money, and parents and kids felt stressed because some adult thought, “Hey, wouldn’t it be swell if we taught these four-year-olds to write?” without any regard to developmental milestones.
We see this early push all the way through high school. Eighth graders take science classes that used to be taught to ninth graders, and kids in tenth grade read literature that used to be taught in college. In Montgomery County, outside Washington, DC, the school district attempted to teach algebra to most students in eighth grade rather than ninth grade, with the goal of eventually teaching it to most kids in seventh grade. It was a disaster, with three out of four students failing their final exam.18 Most eighth graders don’t have sufficiently developed abstract thinking skills to master algebra. Historically, kids started college in their late teens because they were ready; while there have always been exceptions, on the whole fourteen-year-olds weren’t considered developmentally ready for rigorous college work. Ironically, in the attempt to advance our kids, our own thinking about these issues has regressed.
Ned fields requests from many parents who want their kids to start SAT prep in the ninth grade. Ned tells them that it’s a mistake to spend their kid’s time and their money for him to teach them things that they will naturally learn in school. It’s far better to wait for them to develop skills and acquire knowledge at school, and then to add to that with some test preparation in their junior year. Starting test prep too early is not just totally unnecessary, it is actively counterproductive. It’s like sitting your fourteen-year-old down to explain the intricacies of a 401(k) plan. It’s not going to register.
Bill routinely deals with the aftermath of early academics gone wrong. He has seen many kids who shut down or cry upon being asked to read because they’ve experienced it as so threatening in the past. When kids fail again and again, they internalize failure. Bill recently spoke with a child psychologist whose four-year-old daughter felt like a failure because she couldn’t write in her journal as well as her classmates.
The central, critical message here is a counterintuitive one that all parents would do well to internalize: earlier isn’t necessarily better; and likewise, more isn’t better if it’s too much. To counter the effects of too-early learning, here are some things you can do:
Where possible, choose schools that are developmentally sensitive in their curriculum and appropriate for your child. Some kids will do really well as big fish in small ponds. It gives them the confidence to tackle the currents without being afraid of being swept away. They get to grow strong and feel strong. So what if there are bigger fish in bigger ponds? Help your children find the right curricular environments for them.
Relax and take a long view, even if no one else around you is. Most kids who learn to read at five aren’t better readers at nine than those who learn to read at six or seven. Bill remembers vividly the mild panicky feeling he and Starr had when their daughter was five years old and some of her friends were starting to read. Even though they knew that kids learn to read much easier at age seven than at age five, and that pushing academics too early was harmful and produced no lasting benefit, Bill and Starr wondered if they were jeopardizing their child’s future by letting her fall behind her peers. They briefly considered pulling her out of her nonacademic kindergarten. But they stuck to their guns and left her in a school that did not push and did not give her any homework until the fourth grade. Despite an unrushed start, she received her PhD in economics from the University of Chicago at the age of twenty-six and is a successful economist. Bill loves telling that story, not to brag (okay, just a little), but to emphasize that it is difficult to buck the tide even whe
n you know the current is carrying you the wrong way.
Remember that any gains from rushing development will wash out. Parents often tell Bill that their third grader is doing fourth- or fifth-grade math—but he never hears twenty-six-year-olds brag that they’re more successful than most twenty-eight-year-olds.
Don’t go overboard on AP classes. You are doing your child no favors if you let her take more APs at the cost of her mental health and sleep. There’s a reason why kids get more out of Moby-Dick in college than in high school. When we consider the enormous differences in the maturation of their prefrontal cortex—and the associated development in their capacity for abstraction and emotional maturity—it should come as no surprise that the majority of students will understand and appreciate novels written for adults better when they’re older. The same is true for complex scientific theories and data, quantitative concepts, and historical themes, which are easier for most kids to grasp when they are college aged. This isn’t to say that some students aren’t ready for college-level courses when they’re fifteen. The problem is that when this becomes the default for most students (I’ll never get into college if I don’t have five AP classes) it’s destructive.
Test Kids the Right Way
Both of us test kids for a living, so we’re not against tests. We live and breathe tests, and think that, when done right, they can be incredibly useful tools.
Neuroscientists are fond of saying “neurons that fire together, wire together.” What we do repeatedly with deliberate effort more readily becomes etched in our brains. Henry Roediger, a University of Washington psychologist who is an expert on testing, thinks that while the word “test” has a very negative connotation, it’s still one of the most powerful learning tools available. As he observed, when you struggle to recall a fact or concept, the act of doing so strengthens your memory of it, unlike simply reviewing notes. “Testing not only measures knowledge but changes it,” he said.19
Testing also helps you recognize what you’re missing, and helps teachers know where to spend their time. There’s nothing like objective feedback to clarify or confirm perceptions about what you do (or don’t) know. Testing can also mitigate test anxiety. Testing yourself, alone or in a study group, will put you under some pressure, and getting used to mild pressure is a useful stepping-stone to the stress of the actual exam.
That said, we have significant problems with standardized testing in schools as it exists today. Many of the policy makers who espouse these tests are politicians, not inspiring educators. They talk a lot about things like accountability, raising the bar, narrowing the gap, and “racing to the top,” and very little about the research that shows that a heavy reliance on standardized testing is an ineffective way to improve educational outcomes. Our favorite Finn, Pasi Sahlberg, looked at the test-based approach that so many nations around the world use and showed that test scores in these countries are actually declining. By contrast, Finland chose to emphasize highly trained teachers, collaboration, school-based curricula, and a leadership style among educators built on trust. Finland’s scores improved.
Also consider testing from the teachers’ point of view. It forces them to teach to the test, giving them little autonomy. It makes them fear for their job, as their contract often depends on the test scores of their students (over which they have little direct control). They may look at their fellow teachers as competitors rather than collaborators (Is the other ninth grade teacher getting all the top kids in the class?) and at their students as potential obstacles to their advancement. They may encourage a kid be held back, as they are not incentivized to think as much about his overall well-being as his potential test scores. Most often test results are used to evaluate teachers and school districts in the aggregate. All of this gets in the way of the teacher’s ability to do his or her job effectively and to connect with students.
Anything that makes kids, parents, and teachers more stressed and lowers their sense of control is bound to fail. An overly strong emphasis on testing makes education narrower and more frustrating. Every student should have something to look forward to every day, and test-driven education puts this at risk by squeezing out time for elective classes and focusing those hours on test prep instead. Many kids shine most brightly in classes that aren’t core academic subjects (or in activities that aren’t classes at all)—like art, music, shop, and drama. These are never “station to station” and always about trying to make a product or performance better, bit by bit. From a motivational perspective, your kid may not love geometry, but if he knows that he has chorus, band, art, or shop class coming up, where he really gets to be creative and enjoy what he’s doing, it sure makes learning the Pythagorean theorem more palatable.
In the 2014–2015 school year, more than 650,000 students opted out of taking standardized tests in school. We wouldn’t recommend opting your child out of the test if he wants to take it, but talk to him about the pros and cons and let him choose.
If your child opts in to standardized testing, you can still communicate what value the tests have and what value they don’t have. Tests like the Educational Records Bureau (ERB) or the Common Core should only be used to assess skills and knowledge and to help guide teachers. They are not a label for your child’s intelligence. Make sure she knows it.
Ways to Bring a Sense of Control to School
In sum, schools should focus more on nurturing healthy brain development and less on test scores. They should be exploring how to make the school experience less stressful, to promote self-understanding and self-regulation in students, to maximize self-motivation by promoting autonomy, and to maximize engagement by incorporating the arts into all aspects of teaching.20
There are a number of programs that are leading the charge for a reduced-stress school environment. These include the Quiet Time Program we talked about in Chapter Six, which was first implemented in 2009 at Visitacion Valley Middle School, an underfunded urban school in San Francisco. Most students practice Transcendental Meditation for fifteen minutes twice a day. (Others read or rest during “quiet time.”) When Bill toured the school in 2011, the assistant principal said that prior to the program’s launch, there would have been thirty kids standing around outside the school counselor’s office because they’d been tossed out by their teachers for fooling around in class. In just two years, there were none. Many other schools in California and around the country have adopted Quiet Time programs, and are seeing remarkable results.21 While Quiet Time is often used in underfunded schools, it is just as valuable at the other extreme. As an administrator from an elite girls’ high school in Chicago told Bill, she adopted the Quiet Time Program because “I just couldn’t send one more stressed and depressed kid to the hospital.”
Some schools promote self-regulation by teaching their students about mindful awareness or by incorporating mindfulness practices schoolwide, through programs like Zones of Regulation. In this program, children are taught to ask themselves how they’re feeling in their body and to recognize certain signals. When children are in the “red zone,” they are feeling intense and emotional. The “yellow zone” is also a heightened state, but they have more control over their actions. In the “green zone,” they feel calm, alert, and focused. This is the optimal state for learning, the place where kids are challenged but not unduly so. And then there is the “blue zone,” where a child is bored, tired, or sad. We’ve seen classes of first and second graders come in from recess hyper and frenetic, only to have their teacher explain that it was time to get into the green zone, and encourage the class to take some deep, focused breaths together in order to calm their bodies down. And it worked.
Other schools are substituting fitness training for traditional high school PE classes in order to take advantage of the tremendous cognitive power of vigorous exercise, or placing a strong emphasis on Carol Dweck’s approach to developing a growth mindset in students. We support all these programs—and other approa
ches that promote the development of a healthy sense of control.
The approach to your child’s education that we’re advocating won’t always be embraced. In some regions of the country (and, indeed, of the world), the ultracompetitive school, the multiple AP classes, and the race to the finish feel as inevitable as the Starbucks on every street corner. In their conversations with Bill over the years, many driven teenagers who are taking medication for depression have implied (as have their parents) that if they managed to get into an elite college, it would be worth everything they had done (i.e., compromised) to achieve that end. It’s not. As Robert Sapolsky has said, depression is the cruelest disease. For kids to become depressed because they’re too tired and stressed and have been driven for too long is too high a price to pay for that admissions letter. Getting in is only one piece of the college experience. The most crucial question, which we will turn to later, is what happens when you get there.
What to Do Tonight
Teach your kids that they are responsible for their own education. Kids should feel in charge, not that school is being done “to them.” Note this is very different from blaming kids who are struggling.
The Self-Driven Child Page 19