Originally Posted by The Play Room:
For anyone wanting documented evidence re: preschool google "the Perry Preschool Study". This preschool program was NOT academic. It allowed children to be children, to explore their own interest through play. They were not confined to desks to do educational tasks. They had short group times that brought the group together for information, but mostly the children chose what they wanted to work on and with who. The 'teachers' were observers, sometimes co-players. They taught with suggestions and guidance. They introduced new concepts and then let the children go with it. This is definitely NOT what you find in a normal preschool and for this reason I don't really feel that preschools are a good thing. BTW- I homeschooled all three of my children from middle school through high school. If I had it to do over, I would have started homeschooling earlier and they would have never entered the doors of a public school.
Perry provided preschool education and home visits to
disadvantaged children during their preschool years.
The Perry study is a critical experiment in the literature that examines the benefits of early childhood intervention.
The study is based a randomized controlled trial, considered the gold standard for assessing the effectiveness of a treatment.
However, these social experiments often suffer from imperfect randomization protocols, and the Perry study is no exception.
When only a SMALL percentage of children are studied, the results of course are skewed.
The Perry Preschool study is not a valid example of how children that aren't disadvantaged benefit from preschool experiences.
ANYONE disadvantaged in comparison to their 'peers' will obviously benefit from extra attention and experiences. I don't need a 40 yr study to know that.
I DO find the Perry Preschool study to be a valuable resource for early childhood but not in the context in which they meant it to be.