You have most likely experienced the easy going schedule of a  kindergartener  at some point in your early life.  However, as the scholastic bar rises throughout high schools worldwide, government officials finally realize the importance of testing the intellectual and physical abilities of students who still have trouble forming complete sentences.

New tests implemented by many elementary schools throughout the country  upon their kindergarteners reflect government money well spent, assessing a milestone within every child’s life; readiness for kindergarten. The Kindergarten Readiness Assessment tests a wide range of skills including gross motor, fine motor, auditory processing, visual discrimination, letter/word awareness, phonemic awareness and math/number processing. These developing minds now suffer through nightly homework and daily skill drills necessary to further the United States’ position as a dominant educational force in today’s competitive world. Last time I checked, kindergarten revolved around imaginative play as a catalyst for social development, not stagnant test-taking as an approach to quantify intelligence. If children learn to dislike school at a very young age, the long term repercussions are unimaginably frightful. Five and six year olds are supposed to have fun at school, they are not supposed to be force-fed standardized tests.

Finland, for example, is the educational powerhouse of the world, spending only 10 billion dollars annually on education compared to the United States’ 800 billion. Exemplifying the importance of extensive social interaction within a developing mind, Finland sends its kids to government funded day cares from ages 3 to 6, which provide extensive access to peer communication, empathy, social awareness, and self-reflection; and the early development of these skills obviously correlate to Finland’s top of the line scholastic world ranking. Knowing this, our education system should back away from early childhood testing, and encourage the traditional social atmosphere that has facilitated early childhood learning for the preceding centuries.