Penni, I think social promotion happened because of the way modern schools are set up, with each class being a very specific group of children all born within the same twelve-month period. When we had one-room schoolhouses in America it was much more normal for children to be of very mixed ages, and it was not really assumed that because you were a particular age, you were at a specific place in the learning process. Teachers must have been very flexible!
I personally think it is extremely abnormal for children to be surrounded only by their peers, and one of the reasons I like homeschooling is that it is more natural for learning and socializing and everything else to interact with a wide variety of people all day, from toddlers to the elderly. When you really think about it, until we set up schools children interacted with their families, their neighbors and their communities, learning crafts and vocations as well as academics.
But since that wide age range in one room is not the case anymore, I suspect schools have rules about how large the gap can be in a particular grade. Obviously, even though a student who may be seven or eight has not learned how to read, it would be awkward to have him in a class with five- and six-year-olds. I remember a lot of mixed classes, two grades at the same time, where this was more normalized, so slower children didn't feel bad, but for some reason these classes have become less common. Perhaps they are more difficult to teach. But while I agree with you that self-esteem comes from an appreciation of yourself for who you are, not who you wish you were, if a child is ashamed and traumatized and teased because he is obviously older than the other children in the class, it might well lead to even more serious learning difficulties.
I think this is one of those situations where more money may need to be spent on education, to really intensify instruction for children who do not learn to read quickly in the primary grades, because it is the lack of reading skills which pyramids into general failure in school. Obviously, hiring more teachers would be quite expensive, but these children need to be identified and helped early. There are so many active seniors and other adults who love to volunteer, though, that I wonder if there are programs anywhere that teach them to tutor slow readers in a specific way.
Because of your oft-voiced feelings on self-esteem, I think you might find it somewhat amusing that even though students in California did not do very well recently on standardized tests which compared them to students in other countries, they were interviewed at the time they were tested, and most of them FELT very good about how well they had done!!! |
