All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten

Researching and writing in the early childhood development field have caused me to be alert to adult behavior that seem more appropriate for children. Lately, many adults that I see on TV and daily interaction seem to be regressing to childlike behavior. In response I decided to review Robert Fulghum's All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten.

I read All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten in 1990--since 1985 I track books/audiotapes that I read/listen to partly out of ego enhancement and partly to challenge myself to read more each year. In any case, I skimmed the book recently to reacquaint myself to what Fulghum considered the foundation of the kindergarten curriculum. I guess he is mainly addressing social skills.

I think our social skills are worse than ever before. Moreover, we accept the lack of social skills as being OK with crude and rude behavior being in vogue. More troubling is that we adults are either forgetting or don't care that we modeling behavior for children ,and we aren't doing a good job in general. That brings me to the point that children learn social behavior well before the kindergarten period, and asking schools to undo that learning is well beyond their capability.

Social Comparisons Among Preschoolers

Note the following from an article titled Social Comparisons in Early Childhood in Science Daily News:

"A new study by University of Michigan psychologists Marjorie Rhodes and Daniel Brickman questions these previously held conclusions about preschoolers’ behavior, by demonstrating that young children do indeed respond negatively when they perform more poorly than a peer—if that peer is of the other gender (e.g., if a girl learns that a boy has performed better than her, or vice versa)."

Social Skills...That's the Ticket!

Many years ago in a counseling degree program, I learned that people are fired from jobs more for poor social skills and not fitting in than for lack of job skills for the job. In any case, today I came across an article that provided the results of following high schools students for then years after graduation and discovered that "high-school students who had been rated as conscientious and cooperative by their teachers were earning more than classmates who had similar test scores but fewer social skills..."

Well, what if we stressed social skills in addition to reading, writing, and math from the pre-k level upward?