By Brian Jones

In Reclaiming Childhood: Letting Children Be Children in our Achievement-Oriented Society, Dr. William Crain outlines myriad reasons why kids are under too much pressure - from parents, teachers, schools and society in general - to grow up too fast, to perform on standardized tests and to compromise every quality that makes childhood endearing.

The basic problem, Crain says, is society's tendency to treat children as little adults, and adults' tendency - intentional or not - to devalue or belittle the natural abilities of children as linguists, naturalists, artists and dramatists.

Reclaiming Childhood is filled with anecdotes of super-achieving parents wringing their hands that their 4-year-old will never get into Harvard because he colors outside the lines, of children drawing robotically because society dictates they must learn structure and of vapid adults squashing a child's curiosity by praising her instead of asking questions. The people leading the current "standards" movement, Crain says, are sucking the life from children before they can realize their potential.

Child-centered Approach

The standards movement isn't the entire problem, Crain says. Rather, it's symptomatic of society's preoccupation with the future. Education should not be about providing a child with basic skills for the future; it should be about nurturing a child's natural tendencies today.

Children would be much better, Crain continues, under a child-centered approach in which there are no lines at all in coloring, where adults let children define the parameters of their learning and where children wander through Wordsworthian landscapes near babbling brooks, pausing in deep thought to dash off a couplet about frogs. Adults, he continues, are in no position to interfere by determining which skills a child needs to pave the way for his or her own future. This focus on the future, Crain concludes, is ruining childhood.

I don't know about Crain, but had I been indulged to nurture and pursue my "natural" tendencies as an 8-year-old, I'd still be staging battles with my Star Wars figures. In Crain's view, that might be fine. Wouldn't things be better, he asks, if schools let kids naturally determine what they need to know?

Finding Balance

Well, no. I think most parents want their schools to strike a balance between the extremes Crain describes in his book. No, we don't want our children made into dysfunctional, nervous wreck super-achievers by age 5. But neither do we want to entirely indulge the "if-it-feels-good, do-it" mentality, letting children determine what gets taught and what doesn't.

When neither is taken to the extreme, child-centered instruction and standards-based instruction can co-exist in the classroom. There is no great shame in asking children to achieve, nor is it necessary to make learning a misery. Crain even seems to admit as much, writing that rational, "goal-directed modes of thinking are valuable, but so too is the childlike delight in the world as it unfolds before us." I agree. One must eat spinach as well as the dessert.

Crain and I further agree that schools aren't necessarily doing a very good job of serving either part of the meal. But in his discussion of the schools' role, Crain loses his train of thought. He's really not sure what the best role of the school should be; he just knows he doesn't like the current focus on achievement.

Children as Linguists

Crain is a lovely writer, though, with a chatty, casual style, free of the lingo and educatorese that so often makes education books turgid. His chapter on children as linguists, for example - a discussion of the ability of young children to process sounds and learn languages - is one of the clearest and most thoughtful analyses I've seen on the subject. But his misty-eyed propensity to talk about children sitting zenfully among the trees or tripping merrily alongside ponds makes his chapter on children as naturalists a real eye-roller.

Crain tries to remain a compassionate skeptic about child-centered instruction, but he becomes so bogged down in his annoyance with "standards-based parents" that he can't ask the same careful questions he asks elsewhere. If he had, he might have wondered: Can a good instructor teach academic standards to all kids - those walking by the pond and those whose parents are worried about the future - in a way that is consistent with the child-centered approach? The answer, I think, is yes.

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