Backstory: Einsteins at five

Barely 5 years old, Edgar Padilla can accurately draw bar graphs and create "A-B" patterns of geometric shapes. He discusses the finer points of underwater photography. He occasionally infuses his sentences with the word "meta-cognition," to the confoundment of some adults (including this one).

Precocious and tousle-haired, young Edgar may be unusually smart for his age, but his prowess with numbers and language is hardly exceptional: He, in many ways, reflects the rigors and reality of the "new" kindergarten.

Once upon a time, being 5 was all about learning your colors and how to tie your shoes without making a square knot. Today it's more apt to be about deconstructing sentences, performing not-so-simple addition and subtraction, and even learning the rudiments of a foreign language.

Across the country, the accountability movement in education and near obsession with academic excellence is filtering down to the level of the jungle gym and nap-time rug. School districts are pushing students to new levels as a growing body of research indicates the importance of early learning and the demands of a competitive world close in on the American classroom.

To many, the emphasis on academic performance at very young ages is a positive trend that will boost the nation's educational system. But others worry it ratchets up the academic arms race and places too much responsibility on the backs of America's youngest students, at a time when many still put their coats on inside out.

"There's a lot of research indicating that the early years are learning years," says Alan Simpson, director of the National Association for the Education of Young Children in Alexandria, Va. "But too much too soon can be a real problem for children and schools."

The trend has been around for several years, but has accelerated as testing has forced many schools to start preparing students at the earliest levels. At the same time, many children now attend advanced preschools, which makes them ready for more than just coloring within the lines by the time they hit kindergarten. Fully 60 percent of children also go to kindergarten full time, giving them more time to master basic math and reading - something once reserved for first- and second-graders.

"What we're seeing is really the Baby Mozart approach," says Pat Nadeau, an expert at the Erikson Institute for early childhood development in Chicago. "You just keep stuffing information in and assume the child is going to wind up better, smarter, and able to leap tall buildings in one leap."

As the kids in Dawn Lewis's kindergarten class show, they are capable of a lot more than molding Play-Doh. Here in Thomasville, a working-class town in North Carolina's furniture belt, 0students are engaged in a "Bright IDEAS" program developed by a professor at Duke University in Durham.

Below wall posters of bar graphs and pie charts, one kindergartner writes a descriptive sentence about a platypus. Mary-Kate Miller is more curious about Hadiya Monk's braids. But when called upon, she stands up and rattles off a complete sentence about how she's wearing an orange and blue shirt, then mugs for the class.

Page: 1 | 2