Crippling the Young?

One of the major trends in U.S. education during the past decade has been to start children in school at younger and younger ages. Wilson Riles, California's state superintendent of schools, wants to enroll new students when they turn four; New York State's board of regents recommends the age of three. At this point, some 40% of all three-to five-year-olds spend part of their day in classrooms, ranging from expensive private nursery schools to Head Start programs for the poor.

Now a heretical study argues that early schooling can be disastrous: "Sending four-year-olds off to school results in far more harm than good. Children probably shouldn't attend school until they are seven or eight . . . Early schooling is little short of crippling."

Disputes. To be published in September by Columbia University's Teachers College Record, the study was made by a father and son. Raymond Moore teaches education and heads the Hewitt Research Center at Andrews University in Berrien Springs, Mich.; his son Dennis is a graduate student at the University of Colorado. They dispute the three principal arguments in favor of early schooling:

>Children can and therefore should start learning almost at birth, or, as Harvard Psychologist Jerome Bruner put it: "Any subject can be taught effectively in some intellectually honest way to any child at any stage of development." On the contrary, the Moores say, many children's powers of vision and hearing are still forming until the age of eight. Thus they find it difficult to focus on objects at close range, like a book, and to distinguish between similar letters, like m and n. The Moores also cite studies indicating that the nerve fibers connecting the various parts of the brain are not fully developed before age seven or eight. Hence younger children are ill equipped to learn arithmetic and other abstract skills.

>Early enrollment enables children--particularly poor children--to get a running jump on learning. The Moores reply that most early-schooling schemes like Head Start fail to provide any lasting academic advantage, and, indeed, studies show that "the late starter generally does better through school than the child who starts early."

>A school provides a better environment for poor children than the streets or even the home. The Moores argue that except in serious cases of neglect, a young child separated from his mother and enrolled in school is "vulnerable to mental and emotional problems that will affect his learning, motivation and behavior."

Home Teaching. The Moores believe that some form of preschool learning might well take place in the home, with state-hired professionals advising parents on how to nurture their children's growth (a technique currently being tried by HEW's Children's Bureau in Washington). "We must find a child's natural habitat and improve it," Raymond Moore told TIME, "and that habitat is the home." Even in poor families, he says, "most mothers want to stimulate and teach their children but first must be taught how to do it." Only when there is no alternative--as in the case of severely handicapped children or those whose mothers must work --would the Moores permit very young children to go to schools or day-care centers. "Early schooling and parental deprivation together," they say, "are prime contributors to childhood maladjustment, motivational loss, poor retention, deterioration of attitudes, visual handicaps and a wide variety of other physical and behavioral problems."

A number of other educators agree that there is little evidence of lasting benefits from early schooling, but they would not abandon it altogether. Says Psychologist David Elkind of the University of Rochester: "A lot of parents are being sold a bill of goods, but the Moores go to an extreme. If learning is geared to the pace of a child's development, it can be beneficial." Psychologist Earl Schaefer of the University of North Carolina's School of Public Health is also wary of saying that the home alone is the best environment. But, like the Moores, he argues, "until a child has developed language skills, interest and an ability to look, listen and absorb, he should not have a structured environment forced on him."

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