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Politics : View from the Center and Left -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: JohnM who wrote (230496)	8/31/2013 1:41:37 PM
From: neolib	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 542201

There are some conflated issues on the subject of preschool. Kids from poor home situations might well benefit from more and earlier preschool, but I suspect that kids from home situations which stimulate the kids development likely do better starting school later. It is a matter of early preschool protecting the kids from the damage done at home, rather than preschool actually being a greatly positive influence on its own. I'm not aware of studies which have looked specifically at this, but I'd love to see some do so. I think its one of the nuttier ideas that you should rush through childhood. There is no reason to emerge into the work force at 19 vs 22 for example. FWIW, I had a stay at home Mom, who taught me to read and do arithmetic, and who provided a nicely supervised play environment for myself + siblings and any neighbor kids who visited (and the neighborhood parents were similar), and I didn't start 1'st grade (skipped any kindergarten/preschool) until I was 7. I was at the top of my classes from day one through college graduation. Partly I think because I was a little older (how is a 5/6 y/o going to compete with a 7 y/o?), but also, the several years of toil my classmates had been subjected to didn't in fact have them any further along than I was when I joined them. There is another more subtle effect, which I only came to understand in retrospect: Since I excelled from the start, I thought I was in fact better than the others. As an adult, I know this isn't true, but as a child, the ego boost was significant, and gave me a lot of self-confidence. I knew I could academically trounce my classmates, and that provided lots of motivation to do so. My classmates were subjected to the opposite problem: Since they always got trounced, they learned at an early age that that was their lot in life. By the time they emerged from the tender years of grade school they were well familiar with their position. Later in HS, I became friends with several kids (also from very good homes) whose parents had ego problems and were intent on having genius kids make it through HS at 15, and make it through college at 18-19. Since I was at the top of my class, and these kids aspired to the same, they kind of gravitated around me. But I was normal to slightly older age for my grade, and they were very young for their grade. They had lots of social and psychological issues, especially later in college/grad school and work life. The point should be to have a nice life over the course of your life, and its best not to confuse that with being smart for a given age in childhood. Some parents do a lot of damage by not understanding that.

To: JohnM who wrote (230496)	9/1/2013 9:16:22 AM
From: Bread Upon The Water	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 542201

Left leaning think tanks do the same. It's, actually, a mixed bag. Brookings has an excellent reputation. I always read their stuff very, very carefully. They make mistakes, pick policy options I might not, but it's almost always done with the highest professional standards. There are others you might identify as left who would fit this bill. My own reading is that if you take the left/right cut as some sort of basic framework, the left has been much better at fostering serious social research and living by the results. It's been Republican control of national legislative bodies (well, state bodies as well) that either reduces funding for such, suppresses the publication of such, or tries to control the results (classic illustration of this approach was the way Cheney pressured the CIA and Defense Department research staffs to produce his desired results Iraq WMD results). One would think it would be in the interest of Republicans to assess whether the money beng spent is well used or not. (Actually that is in all our interest.) I appreciate your info on the past history of government sponsored research. It's starting to give me some background here. I 'm beginning to appreciate how your arrived at your present view of why it is futile to try to attempt this ---at least currently.