All Work and No Play: How Educational Reforms Are Harming Our Preschoolers

(Hardback)

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Educators, neurologists, and psychologists explain how the high-stakes testing movement, and the race to wire classrooms, is actually stunting our children's intellects, blocking brain development and sometimes fueling mental illness. These experts, including a Pulitzer-Prize nominee, explain why play is not a luxury, but rather a necessity of learning. Testing and technology has become a mantra in American schools, reaching down as far as kindergarten and preschool as politicians and policymakers aim to ensure that our country has a competitive edge in today's information-based economy. But top educators and child development experts are battling such reforms. Here, educators, neurologists, and psychologists explain how the high-stakes testing movement, and the race to wire classrooms, is actually stunting our children's intellects, blocking brain development and sometimes fueling mental illness. These experts, including a Pulitzer-Prize nominee, explain why play is not a luxury, but rather a necessity of learning. This book also spotlights a program at Yale University that, in response to the dearth of play in preschool curricula, emphasized learning through play for youngsters. Children who participated scored significantly higher on tests of school readiness. In addition, an internationally recognized expert explains whyin striking contrast to U.S. policies starting academics in preschoolseveral European countries are raising the age when they begin formal schooling to 6 or 7.

Reviews

"Americans have been duped into believing that young children are like little machines who can be plugged in and ordered to start marching to the drumbeat of academic standards, standardized testing, and computerized teaching. As the contributors to this book so bravely and dramatically show, these tools of the modern school accountability movement make for dull children, de-humanizing schools, and an impoverished future for us all."-Peter Sacks author of Standardized Minds: The High Price of America's Testing Culture and What We Can Do to Change It
"An extremely timely and valuable collection of essays on the importance of childhood play--and how play is endangered in an educational world dominated by standardized tests, early academic pressures, and technological fads....This book is must-reading for educators, psychologists, and parents--indeed, for anyone who cares about the healthy development of children."-William Crain Professor of Psychology, City College of New York author of Reclaiming Childhood: Letting Children Be Children in Our Achievement-Oriented Society
"Exposes the fraud of the so-called educational reform movement that now has schools everywhere in its grip. The book shows vividly the damage being done to millions of children by this 'reform.' The 'reform's' rigid, one-sided emphasis on standards, accountability, testing, and educational computerization at every age level, has been accompanied by a near total sacrifice of early childhood play, body movement, oral story telling, handwork, the arts, and warm human relationships, all shown by extensive research to be crucial to healthy child development, including intellectual development. This book is desperately needed, essential reading for parents, teachers, and educational policy makers at all levels of our troubled society."-Douglas Sloan, Professor of History and Education Emeritus Teachers College, Columbia University
This exemplary anthology highlighting the importance of childhood play responds to what editor Sharna Olfman describes as the current, destructive reform conversations related to the topics of 'standards, accountability, testing, and technology.'...The volume under review does an excellent job of reviewing extensive and impressive research that goes beyond the initial research noted in the 1983 Nation at Risk and explains why the U.S.'s competitive edge will not be retained or attained by the current reform initiatives....This book is highly recommended for a wide readership, especially those in charge of developing and implementing legislation related to early childhood education. Highly recommended. All levels.-Choice
"This exemplary anthology highlighting the importance of childhood play responds to what editor Sharna Olfman describes as the current, destructive reform conversations related to the topics of 'standards, accountability, testing, and technology.'...The volume under review does an excellent job of reviewing extensive and impressive research that goes beyond the initial research noted in the 1983 Nation at Risk and explains why the U.S.'s competitive edge will not be retained or attained by the current reform initiatives....This book is highly recommended for a wide readership, especially those in charge of developing and implementing legislation related to early childhood education. Highly recommended. All levels."-Choice

Author Bio

SHARNA OLFMAN is Clinical Psychologist and Associate Professor of Developmental Psychology at Park Point University, where she is also the founding director of the annual Childhood and Society Symposium. Olfman is the editor of the Childhood in America book series for Praeger Publishers. She is a partner in the national Alliance for Childhood, a group of academics, professionals, teachers, and parents who work together to raise and remedy concerns about children's welfare in light of current cultural trends.