Good Things, Small Packages

By Stefan Kanfer

Some of the best education in America goes on below the adult eye level.

-- Philip Coltoff, executive director, the Children's Aid Society

Coltoff's observation is being echoed in every region of the country. Allan Bloom decried The Closing of the American Mind in his 1987 best seller, referring largely to college students. But in the two-to-six age group, American minds are rapidly dilating. So is the interest in early-childhood education -- ECE to the trade. "This is a wonderful time to be in the field," says Sara Wilford, director of the Early Childhood Center at Sarah Lawrence College in Bronxville, N.Y. "Interest in ECE has never been more intense."

The moment small children step into their first classroom, they enter a new world of learning. Early childhood education has become a cauldron of fresh and innovative approaches, a place where research is applied with dramatic effect. The days of too much control, overstructured hours and too many "punish mechanisms" -- difficult children forced to take naps -- are going. The old "teacher-directed" activities are also on their way out. So are elements of rote learning: reciting the alphabet and learning the early stages of reading through memorization.

Building on research that proves children learn more rapidly, and with more sophistication than authorities thought, educators increasingly use tools like one-on-one conversation and drama. Interaction and imagination are settling in. Pre-schools are bright and inviting; so are the teachers and staffs. They have to be. Close to 60% of U.S. mothers with children under age six are out of the house and on the job. Child care has had to grow up fast.

Although the content and curriculum are as varied as the settings, most ECE centers adhere to guidelines set down in 1986 and revised last year by the National Association for the Education of Young Children. The 60-year-old association is early-childhood's powerful lobby and accrediting body; its membership has doubled in the past decade and now numbers 77,000 professionals. Today it examines teachers and administrators, demands that early-childhood programs meet criteria of health and safety and continually reviews facilities to make sure its standards are being met. When the association outlines the future it wants, it often points to the Perry Preschool Project in Ypsilanti, Mich. Back in 1962, this project selected 123 children ages three and four to take part in an experimental program. All came from families at the poverty level. Half the group was given two years of preschool instruction, 2 1/2 hours a day, five days a week for 30 weeks. The aims were increased self-esteem, socialization and curiosity. Formal learning was not a high priority. The "control " half was given no preschooling. After the preschooling program ended, the kids were tracked through the rest of their school careers to adulthood.

The results, published in 1984, seemed to validate the Head Start program, launched in 1965 as part of the Johnson Administration's War on Poverty. Often located in public school facilities, Head Start provided quality early- childhood education for disadvantaged children. But would it bring any long-lasting benefits?

The Perry Project offered a solid yes in reply. Its preschool group enjoyed a 15 point rise in IQ rating per student after one year. Only 15% of the preschoolers required special education in later years; 35% of the control group needed aid. Of the preschoolers, 67% graduated from high school, vs. 50% of the control group. By age 19, only 31% of the preschoolers had been arrested for some crime, vs. 51% of the others.

The implications for society are as plain as chalk marks on a blackboard: the relatively high cost of the original program -- $5,000 a year for each preschooler -- was actually a bargain. The results at Ypsilanti are echoing louder across the country, not only in facilities for the underprivileged but also in preschools everywhere. Twenty-seven states now fund prekindergarten facilities -- a huge jump from only seven in 1979. And the early-childhood boom goes on unabated. Some 1,700 nationally accredited public programs operate in the U.S.; an additional 4,300 are actively seeking accreditation.

The private sector is even more active. About 5,600 firms provide some kind of day care, and a small but growing group offers on-site or near-site ECE centers. The Lotus Child Center, situated at the company's Cambridge, Mass., headquarters, is an impressive example. The software giant employs 2,000 people, and 60 of their children are currently enrolled. Costs vary according to income. Some parents pay the going rate for private preschools, while other employees are subsidized and pay as little as $20 a week. "In the future," says program director Mary Eisenberg, "we're going to see a lot more of these centers, as companies calculate the gains for two generations: the employees and their kids."

Whether children are at their parents' workplace or in the basement of a public school or in an idyllic country setting, the approach to learning is undergoing a mini-revolution. Today imagination and play are being stressed as never before. Observes Chicago kindergarten teacher and author Vivian Gussin Paley, winner of a $355,000 MacArthur "genius" grant in recognition of her books about young children: "Essentially, everything you learn in school can be broken down into a story. If you allow children to talk about the little worlds they've created, they'll be able to take on everything."

In other words, play is children's work, and finding the right materials -- stories, drama, clay, blocks, sand, water, paints -- really means finding the tools for reasoning and maturing. "What's basic and important to any young child's education," says Shelley Lindauer, head of the Lab School Preeducation Program at Utah State University, "is curiosity and observation. It's much more important to know how to go about finding an answer -- not a right answer."

At the Pacific Oaks School in Pasadena, Calif., while the kids seek answers, they are encouraged to see how their individual actions affect the world around them. Children at the school range in age from three months to nine years. Two-year-olds spend two hours twice a week there, and their parents have to come too. While the kids experiment, the adults get lessons in childhood perception. To develop pre-reading skills, older children tell stories and dabble with writing.

The same philosophy pertains at the Early Childhood Center of Sarah Lawrence, where director Wilford finds that her charges learn by imitating, by pretending to be Mommy or Daddy. "In that process, they are developing language and knowledge of symbolic things -- the basis for reading and writing."

In the University of Alabama in Birmingham programs, older kids stage plays and operettas; younger ones play with blocks as a means of learning how to add and subtract. Says director Virginia Marsh: "We have never had a discipline problem. The children are so busy doing things that they don't have time to get bored."

The children in Birmingham -- and everywhere else in the country -- are going to be a lot busier in the coming decade. And so are their instructors. Yale Professor Edward Zigler, director of the Bush Center for Child Development and Social Policy, predicts that "by the year 2000, the number of working women will rise to 75%. We will see full-day programs for children from the age of three." It will take thousands of new preschools to meet that demand, and many more thousands of new teachers and assistants. The prospect is inviting and daunting: the millennium is only nine years away.

Listen closely and you can hear the future banging its spoon on the high chair.

With reporting by Karen Grigsby Bates/Los Angeles and David Thigpen/New York, with other bureuas