From reading the chapter, I still have conflicting views about the expanding roles of schools as social agencies. I thought it made some sense that the Kindergarten movement was considered “a primary educational method of dealing with poverty”. Poverty during the 1880’s and 90’s was rampant throughout urban cities and neighborhoods and I thought that providing kindergarten to young children was a great way of providing an early safe haven and a place where they could have an escape from the harsh environments they grew up in. I believe some of this holds true even today. I think it is very important to get children into school at an early age, especially as they are in the critical early learning stages of their life. I think it does help in preparing them for school.
What are the pros and cons of children entering school at such an early age? Is Kindergarten really beneficial to young children?
What troubled me was the sense of stereotyping and generalizations made of parents in these poor urban settings. The individuals who advocated and were behind the kindergarten movement did not believe that parents were able to properly raise and care for their children while living in these “slums”. Maybe this was true in some cases but definitely not in all cases. It would have made more sense for these individuals to figure out how to improve the social and economic conditions of these areas, thus preventing many of these issues with family structure and negative social influences. The play movement and even summer school were also seen as critical in helping alleviate the issues the children faced outside of school and in making up for the deteriorating home life. Although the school reformers mentioned some of the educational and physical benefits of the two, the main reason for their establishment was to keep children off the streets and provide children with the family structure they supposedly did not have at home. But to me, this appeared to be just an attempt to avoid dealing with the actual causes of these problems. Too much blame was being put on families and the home and not enough attention was given to the more severe issues in society.
I still feel this way about many social issues today. Many social advocates, elected officials and policymakers only seem to push for quick fix solutions rather than trying to get rid of the root causes of the problems. Can this be attributed to some of the problems that continue to persist in schools today?
