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Preschool Quotes

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Preschool Quotes

“The business world tells us to focus on what we're best at and delegate or outsource the rest. However, this doesn't work with all your roles, or in every situation you may find yourself in. For example, when applied to parenting, nobody can replace YOU as the parent, not even your spouse. You must act within that role, even if you aren't very good at it, because nobody else can truly take your place.”

“This framing accents the importance of building a tidier system, one that incorporates the array of existing child care centers, then pushes to make their classrooms more uniform, with a socialization agenda "aligned" with the curricular content that first or second graders are expected to know. Like the common school movement, uniform indicators of quality, centralized regulation, more highly credientialed teachers are to ensure that instruction--rather than creating engaging activities for children to explore--will be delivered in more uniform ways. And the state signals to parents that this is now the appropriate way to raise one's three- or four-year-old. Modern child rearing is equated with systems building in the eyes of universal pre-kindergarten advocates--and parents hear this discourse through upbeat articles in daily newspapers, public service annoucement, and from school authorities.”

“Well into my teaching career, I learned that good and bad play are usually a matter of having a script that works or one that needs to be rewritten. Once you begin to depend on storytelling and story acting, you start looking at your classrooms as theater. The children are constantly imagining characters and plots and, when they have a chance, with each other, acting out little stories. You can look at the children and yourself as actors. "Well, this hasn't worked. We'd better think of a better way to pretend this story." What seems to be a chaotic scene, one we might call bad play, is simply a scene that lacks closure for one or more characters. The teacher's role is to help the children make up a new scene. The children become used to the teachers - or even other children - saying, "This isn't working. We need to tell the story of what were doing with each other. What characters are we playing? And what needs to be played in a different way so that the play does not have to stop?" (via a Meghan Dombrick-Green interview with Vivian Paley 2001)”

“What if upon entering the classroom, children find teachers listening attentively for their questions and stories, demonstrating a willingness to engage them in "playing out" their ideas using classroom materials while their propensity to ask questions is at its peak? What if well-educated teachers are guiding children to observe, discuss, imagine, and debate possibilities in the company of their equally eager peers? Our youngest children could,be in such conservatories of educational excellence in our public stools, preparing for their future in school and beyond.”

“The last few years have shown a push for early preschool attendance. So much so that these words may actually sound like heresy. But I will say them anyways: if you do not want to send your kid to preschool and prefer to keep him or her at home with a day rich in conversation and play - going to parks, making cookies, visiting the library, reading books, taking naps, mashing play-doh- I do not believe you are doing your child a disservice. On the contrary, your child is doing just precisely what a little three- or four-year-old should be doing: playing.”

“My nana was always a widow as long as I was alive; my grandfather died before I was born. All the women on my street - there were four houses in a row with all old women who lived alone who were widowed. They all had kids, but they were all widowed. My mom didn't put me in preschool; I didn't know that was a thing. I just hung out with these women all day.”

“At some point I started getting published, and experienced a meager knock-kneed standing in the literary world, and I started to get almost everything that many of you graduates are hoping for--except for the money. I got a lot of things that society had promised would make me whole and fulfilled--all the things that the culture tells you, from preschool on, will quiet the throbbing anxiety inside you. I got some stature, the respect of other writers, even a low-grade fame. The culture says these things will save you, as long as you also manage to keep your weight down. But the culture lies.”

“Great cycles of history began with vigorous cultures awakening to the needs of children, but collapsing with frayed family ties. Have we failed to learn lessons which Ancient China, Greece and Rome learned too late - about day care and death houses for old folks? Do we without protest accept accelerating preschool and nursing home cultures which warn ominously that the earlier you institutionalize your child, the earlier he will institutionalize you!”

“We're not going to give tax breaks to billionaires and then cut back on the needs of our elderly or poor or kids or education. We're not going to privatize Social Security - in fact, we're going to strengthen it. We're going to provide quality education for every kid in America, from preschool through college. We have to take on these corporate leaders who are selling out the American people, whose allegiance is now much more to China than it is to the United States. If we have the courage to take these people on, I think we can overwhelm George W. Bush and his friends.”

“You can argue that it's a different world now than the one when Matthew Shepard was killed, but there is a subtle difference between tolerance and acceptance. It's the distance between moving into the cul-de-sac and having your next door neighbor trust you to keep an eye on her preschool daughter for a few minutes while she runs out to the post office. It's the chasm between being invited to a colleague's wedding with your same-sex partner and being able to slow-dance without the other guests whispering.”

“The America of Obama's dreams is not the one of self-reliance and entrepreneurship to which he paid phony lip service at the beginning of his speech. It is an America in which the government, rather than the private sector, creates wealth and leads ignorant, helpless people by the nose from cradle to grave, from preschool to the academy, with the caveat that if they succeed too much, they will make themselves enemies of the state and targets for punitive action. Obama's new American dreams is an American nightmare.”

“Many Americans have lost confidence in the way our criminal courts assess guilt and innocence. Whatever one thinks of the verdicts, the recent trials of O.J. Simpson, Erik and Lyle Menendez, and various defendants in preschool molestation cases have been lengthy, lawyer-dominated soap operas in which the search for truth has been subordinated to the manipulation of procedures.”

“Interestingly, the British government announced a few weeks ago that they were going to introduce 500 educational targets for preschool children. And teachers complained that “when are the children going to have time to play?” Well, they’re not supposed to play, because play is a right-brain, ad-lib, creative pursuit. The idiot politicians who are introducing it don’t understand this, but the shadow-people from which it is generated certainly do. They want to stimulate the left brain as early as possible.”

“My daughter was a toddler. I had no idea there was anything wrong with kids' media.I started watching little preschool shows with her or G-rated videos or whatever; I couldn't believe what I was seeing, that there seemed to be far more male characters than female characters in what we make for little kids. It was just a shock.”

“The White House comes out and says it's going to do a major study of the effects on preschool-age children using Ritalin, Prozac and other drugs. I know in advance what the study's going to say. The results are in before they even start. They're going to do a window-dressing control while praising the overall need for the drugs. In the end they're going to try to peddle more drugs than before while making us think they're clamping down; that's my guess.”

“If we can make sure that that young boys starting at the age of three or four already knows their colors and their letters and are getting good preschool, and by the time they get into school they've got a good teacher and are getting the support that they need and are able to keep up with their classwork, that is going to do more to reduce the incarceration rate at the same time, obviously, as it increases the college enrollment rate.”

“I have a very positive and optimistic view about what we can do together. That's why the slogan of my campaign is 'Stronger Together.' Because I think if we work together, if we overcome the divisiveness that sometimes sets Americans against one another, and instead we make some big goals - and I've set forth some big goals: Getting the economy to work for everyone, not just those at the top, making sure that we have the best education system from preschool through college, making it affordable, and so much else.”

“Twenty per cent of American children grow up in poverty, and that means they get inadequate nutrition, inadequate health care, and because we have a very local education system, they get inadequate access to education. With those as a starting base, you perpetuate inequality. That's why, here in New York, Mayor de Blasio has made a big deal of trying to focus on preschool education, because by five years old, there are already huge differences. We've finally begun to recognize it.”