For a rarefied set of American parents, the quest for a child’s preschool is akin in intensity only to the competition for a Rhodes Scholarship. It is tougher than gaining entrance to Harvard and is the stuff of great social chatter.
The reality, however, is that most kids in America do not come from homes where the parents assess the thickness of a preschool’s foam rest mats, check the credentials of teachers and discern whether the proportion of wood to plastic objects is appropriate. Instead, for many parents, kindergarten is a big enough hurdle.
So what of the recent assertions that the most important learning happens before a child is 3 years old? Should tots barely able to tie their shoes spend a full day at nursery school? What is wrong with day care or staying home with a parent before heading off to the cruelties of kindergarten?
Parents aren’t the only ones asking these questions. As the nation focuses on the efforts of Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich and the state legislature to make preschool available to all, regardless of income, we take on the subject with our cover story, “Sandbox Cum Laude.”
Drafted into service this week are Donna Leff, a onetime Tribune assistant city editor who is now a professor at Northwestern’s Medill School of Journalism, and David Kirp, a public policy professor at the University of California at Berkeley. They guide us through the debates over what the preschool experience provides children and who should be entitled to receive it. As former University of Chicago chancellor Robert Maynard Hutchins said, “The object of education is to prepare the young to educate themselves through their lives.”
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etaylor@tribune.com
