Buffalo Makes Kindergarten Mandatory

Reason ^ | July 1 2014 | Brittany Ann Morrisey

[PoloSec]

Should kindergarten be mandatory?

Lawmakers in Buffalo, New York, think so. The city recently changed its policy and made kindergarten mandatory for all 5-year-olds. Parents in the city must now send their little ones to the schoolhouse or face enforcement through child protective service agencies.

Currently, the quasi-grade it is not mandatory in most states. While all states provide kindergarten, parents are under no legal obligation in most states to send their kids off to the school until their sixth birthday.

Policymakers in Buffalo say they need the law to improve kindergarten absenteeism rates. Before attendance was mandatory, parents who voluntarily chose to enroll their kids didn't "take attendance for kindergarten classes seriously."

It is hard to take a grade that most people associate with finger painting seriously. And that might be part of the issue. Kindergarten isn't just child's play anymore. Researchers say kindergarten has become the new first grade where little tots are taught to read and write.

So, when kids miss that year, they might miss out on being on par with their peers in first grade.

We can thank the Germans for our traditional view of the class. Friedrich Wilhelm Froebel established the first kindergarten program in Germany in 1837. Froebel emphasized learning through playing and believed in the importance of stories, music, nature studies and symbolic ideas like children sitting together in "the kindergarten circle."

The word kindergarten originated from the way Froebel described children: as plants who were nurtured by their gardener/teachers.

Another component of the bill is prekindergarten. Interim Buffalo School Superintendent Will Keresztes said the bill will "heighten interest by parents in sending their children to prekindergarten programs. He added that the district would push for more money from the state for an expansion of prekindergarten classes.

So, it may be only a matter of time before prekindergarten becomes the new kindergarten and so forth. Which raises the real question: How early can the state force parents to give up their kids to the school system?

[nathanbedford]

Nathan Bedford's first Maxim of American politics: all politics in America is not local but ultimately racial.

Since long before the Kerner report we have had two Americas and after trillions of dollars and the best of intentions the two worlds in many ways seem to have grown further apart. The city fathers of Buffalo are looking over the landscape of the inner-city and in their despair they say to themselves, let us take these children out of this hopeless and dehumanizing environment as early in their lives as possible and introduce them to a civilizing influence.

In this context, calls on this thread for inner-city children in Buffalo to be homeschooled borders on lunacy. Yet we have no way to distinguish between healthy home environments and unhealthy home environments and we dare not do so on the basis of race. White suburbanite parents are finding their school system adopting draconian regulations across the board as a result.

Much of the regimentation in the American school system comes from our inability to cope with America's original sin, it's problem with race. Each step in this process fits into the progressive agenda and renders our schooling process more and more dehumanizing and ineffective.

[workerbee]

Kindergarten has been mandatory in my state since... I don’t know when. A while. It was full-day kindergarten (vs. 1/2 day) that became mandatory just about 6 years ago.

[GeronL]

Is there such a thing as a healthy public school environment? Not these days.

[nathanbedford]

Except for some very few white suburban schools and affluent areas the American primary and secondary education system is a disaster. Race is one of the primary causes of the breakdown.

Progressives are trying to use the school system as a Skinner box to effect their social engineering dreams. We see the same instinct at play in our military today. Race is one of the justifications for imposing ever more and more regimentation in the school system, creating a death spiral.

Since we are dealing with a problem rooted in race, common sense is removed from the equation. As to your specific point, the dysfunctional home environment in inner city Buffalo is probably worse than their kindergartens.