The idea of free preschool for every child who wants it is a growing trend. Georgia currently offers free preschool for all 4 year olds, funded by the state lottery.
New York, Oklahoma and Florida will vote on the issue this fall. And the city of Los Angeles may use money from a cigarette tax to fund it in their city.
How do you determine what is an appropriate preschool for receiving funding? With more kids going to preschool, more schools will be needed. As it is now, there are small family-based in -home preschools. Do those count? What about religious schools?
The big one: FUNDING. This is an incredibly expensive proposition. Is it worth it?
Is this idea just asking taxpayers to pay for day care?
I think it’s a very good idea. I think we should have free government childcare for infants as well. it would make things a lot easier for working parents. It’s a lot better use of money than spending billions of dollars on illegal wars.
So its gonna be guns or butter, or guns or diapers, or butter or diapers?
Daycare sure, school no, at least nothing more educationally intrusive than Big Bird. We already subject the poor little shits to twelve long years of repetitive, mind-numbing crap as it is.
I don’t think we are talking about daycare, as these programs are not proposing the nine hour five day a week situations most working parents require. Granted, if you can find work that fits your funded pre-schoolers schedule, you could use it as daycare, but I don’t think its very likely.
Socialized daycare and universal preschool are two seperate things - although both are interesting (but expensive) ideas.
According to info I found, not all states require kindergarten to be available. It appears that 9 states do not require any sort of kindergarten to be offered.
With the current state of our public school systems (by and large) I don’t think adding another year on school will help. It will likely just draw further funds from the other 12 years of school, making them even more under-funded.
IMO sghoul has nailed it. If universal preschool is supposed to help children of the financially disabled it ignores the elephant in the room. There is no clear relationship between money spent and scholastic achievement. You have to deal with dead-beat parents, which is not an easy task.
I’m not accurately informed about how it goes in other European countries, but in Belgium kindergarten is open for free for all children from the age of 2 and a half. Actually, children who don’t attend this at least one or two years, are said to have a serious setback when starting their first year at elementary school.
I can’t say if that is correct, I wasn’t raised in Belgium and neither are my children. But from what I see in my Belgian family the kindergarten playfully prepares the children to the “real” school education.
The situation in Belgium is different then in the US in the way that in elementary school the children already have to spend a serious amount of the time at the study of one of the other languages (French for the Flemish and Flemish for the French languaged; German is a choice in the humaniora).
But I still would recommend this system everywhere.