Response: "American Schools Are Training Kids for a World That Doesn’t Exist"

There is a wonderful OpEd on Wired this week. It is about the need for citizens to learn how to discover. As I read it, I thought how sad it is that the discovery process is taken away from children as they move through a traditional K-12 system in the US. I suspect overworked teachers, crowded classrooms, and children who are not encouraged to connect personally with the material all contribute to the perpetuating the problem. Luckily, with our preschoolers we can revel in discovery - theirs and ours - for a handful of years before entering Kinder.

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You should read the entire article but I will give you a snippet here:

"We “learn,” and after this we “do.” We go to school and then we go to work.This approach does not map very well to personal and professional success in America today. Learning and doing have become inseparable in the face of conditions that invite us to discover." http://www.wired.com/2014/10/on-learning-by-doing/

Preschoolers are experts in learning by doing. Almost everything they do is "doing" from stacking blocks, to riding tricycles, to scribbling, painting, and molding. The important thing for us to do as parents is to step back and let our children do their things in peace. The more practice they get at being on their own, learning to discover, enjoying their experiments without us butting our noses in, the better equipped they will be to maintain that skill in years to come.