Is it a good idea for parents to send their children to school at the kindergarten and preschool levels?

The advent of industrial education in the last century has brought about a severe change in family dynamics as compared to a few decades ago and even more when compared to a few centuries ago. As the years have gone on, attending school is expected of more and more people and the number of years in school has increased. Fifty or more years ago, it wasn't unreasonable for a child to stop going to school at age twelve or thirteen and then start helping out with the family business. Now, however, people must complete at least high school in order to have most jobs available to them and must complete an undergraduate degree to be competitive in the job market. In addition, because they don't have time to both continue their career and stay home with their children, parents will send their children to day care, preschool, and kindergarten before they even reach primary school age. As a result, children are increasingly being raised by teachers rather than parents and their learning is happening almost exclusively in the industrial education environment designed to create identical, productive members of society. This recent emphasis on having all learning happen in schools is not conducive to helping children grow up or be connected to their families for a variety of reasons.

First of all, when children spend their formative years with their community and their family, they have one-on-one interaction available to them all the time and can learn anything that they're interested in relatively quickly. In a classroom environment, one teacher is handling upwards of twenty kids and so each child is receiving substantially less attention. If a kid doesn't want to be learning about something, they can easily tune out as the teacher focuses on the kids who are already engaged. This kind of disconnection from learning breeds a kind of apathy in most students today. By the time many students reach high school they've gained a "why does this matter?" outlook on education, an outlook that I've seen in many of my peers including myself. If, however, kids are taught by their parents, they have the opportunity to learn whatever they want. Learning can happen constantly every day rather than in the strict context of classrooms and tests. This kind of environment and attention generally breeds an excitement for learning rather than disillusionment.

Another problem is that because students are learning alongside twenty kids of various skill levels, they learn much slower than they could in better circumstances. I remember learning about American history practically every year through grade school, but I remember precious little from all of those lessons. It's the same with math, by the end of elementary school I could do the kind of basic arithmetic that would've taken maybe a year to learn had I been given the attention and resources to really learn it. If I hadn't been sitting in distracting and inefficient classrooms and instead had been learning addition, multiplication, and other basic math from my parents or even my older brother I probably could have caught on very quickly at a much younger age and then had the room to move forward into more interesting topics. The basic concepts of Biology (e.g. living things are made up of cells) are not beyond the grasp of your average elementary school student, but those kinds of ideas aren't even addressed until middle school. If we lived in a society where kids weren't shipped off to the local education factory at age three and were instead allowed to roam free, enjoy their home life, get to know their parents, and learn from the world and from their parents I think there would be much more exuberance towards learning and kids would learn faster.

An obvious restriction to the concept of learning at home is the knowledge of the parents and the time that parents have available. Adults need to invest a certain number of hours each week in their work so that there can be food on their child's plate every day and this is harder for some parents than it is for others. Families with single parents or who have low income just don't have the time to commit to educating their children. Also, I don't expect every parent to explain to their kids how Chemistry works, but a kid should at least be able to read a book and multiply two digit numbers by the time they start school, at the very least. Both of these problems, though, point to greater societal problems that are generally ignored by the general population. Humans have evolved to live in a community larger than their direct family and so they thrive when interacting with close neighbors. However, families are left to survive on their own in this competitive, selfish world. This leads to the problem of income. Poverty-stricken families are left to survive on their own because our culture simply believes that if you can't pull your weight, regardless of the environment you live in, you don't deserve your meal. This obviously isn't universally true with institutions like soup kitchens and homeless shelters, but there are still politicians and celebrities sitting on their fat yachts eating sirloin steaks as the masses starve to death worldwide.

Overall, sending children to school at an increasingly young age is stunting their learning, destroying their motivation, and eliminating any kind of family dynamic that the world once had. This culture has lost the importance of family. Parents need to work more and more hours each week to earn the money to buy all of their trinkets and children are left to sit in classrooms for year after year learning less than they could be and losing their passion. That is if they're in the lucky group of people getting nice meals on their plate three times a day. Parents shouldn't be sending their children to preschool and kindergarten; they should be getting to know their children, helping them learn, and helping them discover what they love.