Crisis in the Kindergarten: Why Children Need to Play in School

Crisis in the Kindergarten includes new research showing that many kindergartens spend 2 to 3 hours per day instructing and testing children in literacy and math with only 30 minutes per day or less for play. In some kindergartens there is no playtime at all. The same didactic, test-driven approach is entering preschools. But these methods, which are not well grounded in research, are not yielding long-term gains. Meanwhile, behavioral problems and preschool expulsion, especially for boys, are soaring. The negative implications of the current approaches to early education are huge and the needed changes can only be accomplished when parents, educators, school administrators and policy makers are educated and take action together.