Episode #32 – New Format, Milestone Management, & The Preschool to Prison Pipeline

Description:

Description: Join us as we discuss our exciting our new podcast format, how to manage the milestones of children and families, and the failure of would-be specialists to fix the Preschool to Prison Pipeline.

Article:
We don’t just need more Pre-K, we need better pre-K
By: Suzanne Bouffard

View Article

Listen to Episode:

Transcript of Episode:

Radio Announcer: The Reconstructionist Radio Podcast Network presents the Preschool Pioneers Podcast with Reverend Jeremy Walker where you will hear practical and biblical advice from a unique perspective on the subject of Christian education.

Jeremy Walker: The Preschool Pioneers Podcast is brought to you by GCS Apprenticeship Program. For more information, visit GCSApprenticeship.com. Welcome back to another episode of the Preschool Pioneers Podcast. I’m your host Reverent Jeremy Walker. On this edition of the Preschool Pioneers Podcast, we have a few short announcements to make and the beginning of those is going to be of course a new format. We like to thank everybody for joining us today and for those listeners that have been with us since the beginning. We’re going to go ahead and first the short announcements here about our new format.

Now our listeners will have known already that the Preschool Pioneers Podcast is focused on early childhood education, education as a whole, theology behind the importance of Christian education and Christian schools and its importance as well, including also the family, and also giving tips and explanation and instruction about things that can help increase families as far as help them teach their children. Also, not only that, but Christian education, about how to run Christian schools not just maybe being a teacher, but also the management side of that in the real world of reality and what that looks like. We’ve also been touching on also the other side of it, which is the advertising, marketing, and branding side of it as well.

The episodes have kind of jumped back and forth from different kinds of episodes. Well, we’re going to be changing the format a little bit and hopefully the listeners are going to like the new format. I think we’re pretty excited about it. Instead of having episodes dedicated to certain aspects of what we are talking about, we’re going to kind of mix it up a little bit. We’re going to have three segments, each hopefully roughly around 10 minutes each. The first segment we’re going to be doing each of our podcast episodes is going to focus on the importance of Christian education in one factor or another and different aspects of that.

Kind of making people understand the biblical basis for it, the importance of it, and kind of touching on different aspects of that each week as we go through this. The second segment of each of our episodes is going to entail something a little bit different each week and that will be covering kind of like we’ve already done. We’re going to have the teaching and managing with success aspects of it. One week. Maybe the next week we’ll have one with the faith, family, and education aspect of it where it’s more personal, family related, and my wife of course will help me cohost those segments there. For the teaching and management success segments, I will kind of handle those on my own.

Then of course, whenever we have an episode that has anything to do with marketing, branding, and advertising, we’re going to have Reverend Aaron Slack on as well and he’ll help me cohost those episodes. Now the interesting aspects of these will be the second segments and all the segments will have all of us entail. If there’s an episode that has faith, family, and education, my wife will actually be with me to discuss all three segments of the different aspects of what we’re doing. For the advertising episodes and the marketing episodes, Reverent Aaron Slack will be with me and he’ll be discussing with me the various aspects of the different segments as well. That’s what you can expect out of the second segment is the middle part of our episodes.

We’ll have the kind of variety tweak covering different aspects of early childhood education, Christian education, the family, and of course marketing and advertising. Now the third segment is something new that we’re going to be doing. We’ve touched on it a couple times on various episodes we’ve done. We’ve only touched on a little bit, but it’s something new that I want to touch on because I want to give our listeners the importance of Christian education. I’ve heard somebody say before, it went along these lines, kind of more of a political statement really. They said, “So you’re not concerned with politics and you don’t pay attention to them?” They say, “Don’t worry about that. Politics is paying attention to you.”

In other words, even if you’re not paying attention to what’s going on in the world, the world is most certainly paying attention to you. This goes very much so along with education. There are lots of people who may not see the importance of education. In fact, there’s lots of people who don’t even think that education is mentioned in the bible and they think that they can just do whatever they want in the realm of education. Very much mistaken of course, but that is how some people they view it. What we’re going to be doing is covering real world information that’s happening right now. These are books. These are articles.

This is information podcast that other people are doing about early childhood education or education in general because we want to give our listeners something more than just our opinion on things. I want to kind of make sure that our listeners can see what’s going on in the world. Whenever I talk about the importance of education, it’s not just Christians like myself or my wife that are thinking that education is important or that childhood early education is important, but the world is very much so focused on this. Very much so got a very vested interest in education and in educating your children and the children in your community.

Like I kind of gave that little quote there a minute ago, even though you personally maybe as a listener aren’t thoroughly focused on education or your church isn’t or your family is not or if you’re not really invested or your church isn’t invested in helping the community, in educating the community, don’t worry about that because one thing I can tell you is this is that the world has very much a vested interest in educating all those people around you, including young children. I think it’s important for us to pull these real world examples out to try to consistently kind of ring the bell. Let people see it. Let people understand it. Hopefully they will pick up the importance of what we’re talking about education.

As Christians, where it fits in the great commission as part of our responsibilities and duties because we as Christians have the duty to go into all the world and to make disciples of all nations. That includes the youngest to the oldest. Even though we might as Christians or as the churches that are out there in the world might neglect those duties, everyone else in the world that maybe non-Christian are not neglecting that. They’re very much focused on it.

The third segment that we’re going to be having every week is going to be focused on real world examples of things that we see in articles, in news, in podcasts, in everything else in the news that focuses on education or focuses specifically on early childhood education and how there’s been a push because you’ve probably heard us, our listeners have, talk about this push, this push, this push for earlier and earlier and earlier education. Right now there’s kind of a lock from kindergarten through high school and even through college, but there’s a push to go even earlier and earlier and earlier. A lot of these third segments we’re going to have are just kind of show that as an example to show the push that’s going out there.

With these news articles and all this information, we’re going to give also our views on it as Christians. We’re going to give commentary on it as well, positives and negatives, and hopefully we’ll be able to communicate the importance of education to the listener and how you should be focused on it just as much as those who are non-Christians who are focused on it. Because once again even though you as the listener or your church as a listener may not focus on education, may not focus on the education of those around you or those in your community, the people who are non-Christians are not uninterested. They are very interested. Our hopes is that we can make you interested in it as well to see the importance of it as well.

That’s going to be part of our hopes there because as Christians we have should have a vested interested not just our own families. Yes, your family is the most primary thing that you have. As a parent, your children are your main focus, yes, but the community is also part of your responsibility. We can’t just step outside the world and say, “Well, we’re going to take care of our children, but we’re not going to worry about all the other kids out there. We’re not going to worry about the rest of the people in the community.” That actually goes against the great commission. That is kind of the update here for what you can expect to hear on the Preschool Pioneers Podcast. I think you’re going to enjoy it. Because it’s a new format, it’s going to be a little bit faster.

Of course, the content is going to be changing up a little bit here and there and so it’s going to be easier to follow. I think it’s going to bring us more information on a weekly to week basis because it’s going to give you more things to think about from week to week. Not just one topic, but multiple topics per episode. It will help us to kind of broaden our approach to what we’re doing here and hopefully as a listener you’ll get more out of our podcast here. That’s going to be our basic introduction and I’m going to go ahead and jump into our second segment, which is in this episode at least is part of the managing and teaching with success or teaching and managing with success types.

We’re going to jump right into that. Give us just a second and we’ll get right into that. Our second segment here is going to be touching on teaching and managing with success. We’ve done a lot of different episodes on this type of thing with lots of different sides, giving you ideas about things that are important to how to be a teacher, the challenges you’ll face as manager or a director if you ran a Christian school. One of the things we want to focus on is very much a positive. Something that you should be doing if you’re a teacher. Something you should be doing as an administrator or manager or somebody who owns the school. Something that’s going to help you with your public relations. It’s going to help you with your parents to make them happy.

The children as well. You show more of a vested interest in their lives. The topic for today is called milestone management. Now milestones of course, as you know, milestones are those key points in your life that are important to you. If you help parents, those people that are customers that come into your school, if you can help them manage these milestones, make them important, if you can show that you have a vested interest also in these milestones of these children, then you’re going to be doing a big step in the right direction as far as being able to run a successful school that has great PR, that shows the parents that you really are a part of that family and not just a person who’s doing warehousing for children and don’t really have a vested interest in their lives.

Milestone management is what I want to talk about today. Let’s go ahead and touch on a few of these milestones just to kind of put them out there. I’m sure as a listener you’re probably thinking you can probably pinpoint a few of them, but let’s go ahead and go through a couple of these milestones that as a school, as a teacher or as an administration you should be focusing on these types of aspects of milestones. We’re going to give you some tips here about how to better do that, how to not miss these opportunities to really be a vested interest, a vested part of the child’s life. As a side note here, I was in the store just today actually and my son and I were picking some things up at the local store. We had to buy some light bulbs.

When we were at the store, I thought I recognized the gentlemen in front of me. Couldn’t rightly place who he was, but then his wife walks up and I immediately recognized her because she had recently remarried. Well, I say recently is probably 15 years ago now, but she remarried, but her child was in our school over 15 years ago, the preschool that my wife and I operate. We saw her child grow up. We had been a big part of her life. She grew up and now here we were in 2017 and we’re standing in line and we were talking. Of course, she knew us. We knew her.

What happened was as we went into talking about the child and of course, I knew the child by name, I knew the parents by name, and we had all this history of years and years and years of providing childcare for them and now of course the child is now turned to 18 years old and is now off to college. Speaking of milestones, going off to college out of the home, away from home, et cetera, was a big step. This child had gone off to Indiana. Got a full scholarship at a college for running track and this kind of thing. What was interesting is that when you work in a school, it’s not once again like going door to door sowing where you never see the person again or some people go to campuses to sow in or they see people in the street to street preach or whatever.

It’s a very difference between meeting somebody once and just trying to share the gospel in a 10 or 15 minute span, even if you spent hours sitting with people at dinner then you never saw them again. It’s different when you are a part of a person’s life on a day to day basis. You really do become part of the family. I was able to talk with this woman about her child and it was really interesting to me to know now that this child has grown up. This is part of what we’re talking about, the importance of early childhood education because it doesn’t seem very long. I mean it seems like yesterday this little girl was running around my school. I remember her in diapers and now she’s running off to college and she’s grown now.

It doesn’t take long for children to become adults. This is part of the reason why people should really focus and pay attention to education because working with kids is not working with just children with snotty noses that like to cry, but working with children is about rearing the next generation and being able to be a part of that. These milestones we’re talking about here, that’s kind of what it’s about. Being part of these people’s lives on a consistent basis. You’re really part of the family and that happens so many times. People really do consider my family part of theirs and it really is that way and they should feel that way because you are part of their family.

When their parents go off to work, you are in the place of the parent at the time to be there to comfort them, to help them. No matter what happens in the lives in these parents and I’ve seen a lot of them, you are there for all the different milestones and years to come. You sit down and talk about them. It happens quite often. We’ll sit down and talk with the parents 10, 15 years later and we still talk about all the events that took place 10 years ago, 15 years ago. This is what it really means to be dedicated as a Christian. Let’s jump into some of these milestones. I kind of sidetracked there, but I thought that was an important point to point out that when you’re an educator specifically in education with children and families, it’s not about warehousing children.

It’s not about just putting them in a room and taking care of their basic needs, but it’s really being part of the family. I think milestone management really plays a part in that. Here’s a couple, I’m going to list them off, of the milestones, which I think you should focus on that are very integral to a person’s life. One of those would be is their first birthday, meaning you have a person that come in and the child is an infant. That first birthday is a big, big deal. It’s a very big deal. Another milestone would be their first haircut. If you’re parents, you kind of understand this especially parents of little boys in particular. The girls too, but typically with the girls they’ll wait longer to cut their hair.

My little daughter Willow is now a little over two and we still haven’t cut her hair yet because she’s a girl. Her first haircut hasn’t taken place yet, but for the boys, we cut their hair pretty quickly overall. Some people do. Some people don’t. It’s all different, but the first haircut is always a big deal. I think I remember my mother after my first haircut had a little album. When I was much older, I think I was 16 or 17, she actually had a lock of my hair from my first haircut in that little book. Your first haircut I would say is a very big deal for people. Another one is your first tooth. The first tooth.

Whenever children start to teeth and they have their little teeth breaking through, when their child is teething and all the rest, that is a big milestone for a child in their life whenever parents, their children get their first teeth. That’s a big milestone. Another one would be in the same category as teeth, but when they lost their teeth. Losing their first tooth is a very big deal. Of course, it’s going to happen later on. They start losing it more and more. My wife and I now have 11 children and we’ve had lots of teeth loss, but it’s always that first one that’s always a big deal. That’s a milestone. Another huge one, this is a real big milestone is potty training. Potty training is a major aspect for a young child especially for parents.

It might be the first time parenting. I don’t really care how many children you have. We have, my wife and I, 11 children and we just potty trained our 10th child Willow recently. She’s still actually going through that process. We kind of start at the age of two, but potty training is a big deal. It’s a very big deal especially for parents. If you can be there for that and assist with that, it’s really important. Transitioning classrooms. This is as a child gets older, from infant to one year old, from one year old to two year old, two year old to three year old, all the way through preschool and kindergarten and all the rest, these transitions are big milestones in the life of the parent and the life of the child.

Just kind of rolling into that is also entering preschool, entering kindergarten, leaving and graduating kindergarten and graduation programs like when they’re graduating from preschool and they graduate from kindergarten. These are all really big milestones in the early aspects of a child’s life. Much similar to how when they’re older they’re going to high school and graduate high school and we have graduation ceremonies. These are all big deals for people. Now just real quick to touch on some things, that if you are running a school, if you’re a teacher or if you’re running a preschool, if you are the director, the operator or the owner, whatever, here are some ways that you can help to make these milestones important.

You should focus on them. You should talk to the parents about them. Here are some really quick, I’ll just run through these, ideas of how you can make these milestones important and show that it’s important to you as well. Let’s say it’s their first birthday. Child’s having their first birthday. You should do this for every birthday, but just for their first birthday celebration you should suggest, talk to them. You can do cakes. You can do cupcakes. You should do a paper crown of some sort with their name on it, age one. You should take their photo at the school and present that to the parent. Parents really love photos especially if they can take a photo home of their child’s first birthday because they may or may not take a first photo of their first child’s birthday.

They might do digital nowadays, but if you can, like we do at our schools, take a digital photo and have it printed, an actual printed photo, and then give them that actual printed photo, that’s a big deal for them. That’s one way you can memorialize the first birthday. You get all the cake stuff. You do the birthday crown. You sing, but you also take the photo and you give that to the parent. That’s a really easy thing to do, but it’s almost an important thing. Their first haircut isn’t really something that you’re going to do at the school, but it is something that you’re going to kind of discuss in discussion that you have with the parents. They’re going to be the ones to do it.

Of course, in general you should have a policy that no one at your school should ever cut hair for any reason of any sorts because cutting a person’s hair is a very important subject. You just should stay away from that as a general rule. If you don’t this policy, it should certainly be one. First haircut is just something you want to talk about with them. Being there and discussing that as they have it. You might see them come in and their hair is clearly shorter and then you can get into discussion about that. Just good public relations with the parent, being there for that milestone and discussing it because it’s important to them. As you discuss it, it’s going to be shown as also important to you. The first teeth is also more of a discussion aspect of it as well.

They might talk about the child might be drooling a little bit more and what not. Another discussion you have to have with the parent is they could also start to expect low grade fevers. Low grade fevers of course can be teething. They might need to go to the doctor to make sure they can identify that so you don’t send them home and what not for basic teething, but it is something that you should discuss with parents especially new parents or it’s their child so they know that this is something normal. Drooling is normal of course. Maybe suggest bibs for the child so they don’t get their clothes soppy and wet. You can also suggest of course the other stuff. Another aspect of teething can be loose bowels as well.

That’s something that maybe you want to discuss with the parent because it shows that you have knowledge. That these things are normal. It also shows that you’re a person who’s paying attention to what’s going on in their child. You’re also giving helpful advice and that you’re knowledgeable. You know that this is normal and you’re helping them along. That really means a lot to people if you can discuss these types of things with the changes in their child. Loss of the first tooth. They do sell on Amazon and other places these little kind of like holders and they look like teeth. Little plastic holders, little necklace on them. You can purchase those real cheap. Hundreds of them for a few bucks. Those are great for if a child loses their tooth, that’s cool.

Placing it in there and saving it. Put it up in the office and send it home. Now it doesn’t matter if it’s a first tooth or if it’s just a tooth in general, but that’s just a good practice to have to make sure that if you’re running a school, if you’re a teacher, these are not thrown away. Teeth are a big deal. Never throw something like this away. If something happens, I can remember one time we had a child in the playground who had lost a tooth on the playground. We had to go search for it and find it and we did find it. That’s my suggestion to you is if a child … it doesn’t matter if it’s a first or the fifth or the tenth, always try to find any lost teeth and give them back to the parent because these are always milestones and important.

Some people might do the tooth fairy thing or whatever, but it’s always important to the parent so make it important to yourself. Potty training is the next one and that’s really important. We have policies at our school about potty training things that we do. Two different types. You can do pull up method. You can do underwear method. There’s lots of different things that go into it, but you should have policies in place about how you do potty training. Besides doing that you should have checklist so that way the people who are taking the child to the bathroom can check off what’s going on, if they use the bathroom, if they don’t use the bathroom, having accidents.

Showing progress of success where the child’s at and then having individualized note every day to give to the parent as they go home. Now if you do that, it really shows that you have a vested interest in keeping the parent informed. One of the worst things you can do is to bumble this aspect of a milestone, which is to miss this. You don’t want to miss this. You want to go ahead and make sure that you have these in place specifically informing the parent every day of how their child did in potty training. Of course, if there are any bags of dirty clothes, things like that, making sure the parent knows that they have them and where they’re located so you can always get them to them. The rest are kind of going into that.

Transitions and graduations and all of that. You just want to make sure that you’re talking to the parents about their transitions when they’re growing up from infants to ones and twos and threes. Letting them know what’s going on. Introducing them to people, their teachers, and all the rest that goes with it. These are always very good to make sure the parent knows what’s happening next. Don’t wait until the day and move the child and don’t tell the parent about it and forget to the introduce them to the new teachers that are in the room, but acclimate them ahead of time. Let them know a week ahead that their child is going to be moving. Then of course, introduce them. Take a few minutes out of your time.

Walk back with the parents. Say, “Hey, this is so and so and this is so and so.” Introduce them to the new teachers. Then of course, you can also give the option if the child at the immediate moment maybe their transitions get messed up when they’re dropping off and picking up. A good idea also as a school is to have them … Maybe if the child’s having a tough time acclimating at drop off times with the parents dropping off in a new room, let them drop off in the old room where they’re already normal. Then after the parent drops off, then have the teachers move them over. If you do that a week or two, the child typically acclimates to the new teachers, the new room, the new changes and then they’re ready for the parent to drop them off.

Not for everybody, but that’s a helpful tip, which can maybe help you out as well. All the graduation stuff. Make a big deal. First day of preschool, make a big deal about it. Make a sign. First day of preschool. Last day of preschool. Take their photos. Give them their photos. Social media, if you have that, post it on social media so they can share it with their friends and family, coworkers. Give them an actual photo, a hard copy photo, to keep as a memorial for that occasion. Graduations. Also, the same. You should do programs. If you don’t know what a program is, you can go to our website GraceCommunitySchools.com and from there you can links to all the various things. Our YouTube channel is one of them.

On our YouTube channel, you can see graduation programs that we do and we put them up there and what not. You can see what we do for graduations. They’re typically programs. The kids sing and at the end, even preschool they’ll do a cap and a diploma and we’ll read off all their names. Let the parents clap for them or what not. We rent out venues like local high schools or auditoriums to have these in there. We also do singing and all stuff with the graduation. With the K-5ers, we do cap and down and walking like you would in high school where they come out single, by themselves, and walk out there. Shake hands. Take photos and presenting graduating class and all that stuff.

These are good ideas for you if you haven’t already incorporated them or if you’re thinking about incorporating them, but these milestones are very important. Got to wrap up this segment here of milestone management. Hopefully this gave you some ideas about paying attention to what are milestones and then giving some helpful tips and ideas about how to incorporate making those milestones important for the parent and important for the child. Being part of those milestones is a big deal. You’ll find that if you are in this field for any length of time, like I have, and you’re there for all these different milestones, their first birthdays and the time that they potty trained, you’ll have all these stories to share with people later on because you were there with them.

Even though there might lots of other people who come and go in their lives and if you’re working with the general public, that happens a lot. Their family situation has changed. The marital situation has changed, but one thing that is always consistent is the fact that you were there as this preschool. You were there as this Christian school administrator or teacher. You were there being part of the child’s life. Even though a lot of other things were inconsistent, you were always there. That makes a big deal to people. That consistency, the dependability. When you sit back and talk with them like the lady I was talking to, it makes a big deal to them. It’s very important to them because you are part of their lives.

It’s important that you understand that and that you try to make the best of it as you can with the time that you have. That will be the end of this segment. We’ll go into our third segment in just a second. This is our third segment for this episode here. On this episode, I want to discuss in this segment here something that’s real world. It was an article that I had. It was actually on CNN News. Yes, of course, you can make the jokes. Fake news, all the rest, but it’s still a news station and so is articles and this is still somebody’s point of view. Let’s go and to jump into an article that was posted on one of the magazines. It was called “We Don’t Just Need More Pre-K, We Need Better Pre-K.” The article is written, let’s see here, September 14th, 2017 by Suzanne Bouffard.

She, of course, if you’re describing her, this was in her editorial’s note of who she was. She’s a writer specializing in child development and education, PhD in developmental psychology from Duke University, and has conducted education research at Harvard University for decades. She’s the author of a new book “The Most Important Year: Pre-Kindergarten and the Future of Our Children.” This is kind of her bio. Now the bio is put there. You’re supposed to get an idea that this person knows what they’re talking about. I mean after all, this person specializes in child development and education. You’re a common person. You’re just a mom. You’re just a dad. What do you know? This person is a specialist. She actually has a PhD in developmental psychology from Duke University.

I mean after all, do you have a PhD in developmental psychology? Well, this must be a person you must listen to because they have a PhD. They have a doctorate in developmental psychology, so they must know what they’re talking about. Of course, she’s also conducted research at Harvard University for decades. This research at Harvard, this prestigious university, you must pay attention to what she says because for decades now she’s been doing research at Harvard and this must mean she really knows what she’s talking about. On top of that, she’s also written a book. After all, not just anybody can write a book, right? It’s called “The Most Important Year.” She clearly wants you to understand the most important year is preschool and also the future of your children.

Now if I sound a little sarcastic, it’s because it’s sad to me people really do buy into this stuff. They really do buy into people writing articles and they feel the need to write all this stuff in here because frankly the content for most of this stuff doesn’t stand up on its own. What they’re doing is trying to at the beginning before you even get to the information that they’re going to present to you, they want you to already just say, “This person knows what they’re talking about. They’re in authority. I’m just a normal mom. I’m just a normal dad. I couldn’t possibly know anything that this person doesn’t know. After all, they’re specializing this stuff. They have a PhD in this stuff. They’ve been in research for years.

This is somebody that has an authority on the subject. I should be listening to them.” Let’s go ahead and jump in real quick to what she says. I’m going to post a link to this. I won’t go into this too much, but I want you to pay attention that as we do these types of episodes, you’re going to be hearing this type of stuff, PhDs, research, all this kind of stuff. Let’s just jump into her article real quick. The article of course was universal pre-K. Talk about universal pre-K. We don’t just need pre-K, we need better pre-K. What this goes this into is the push for universal pre-K. We already have universal education in kindergarten. They want universal preschool.

Now I’ve been saying this to a lot if you’ve been paying attention that there’s been a push and a push and a push for younger and younger. If you’ve read any of this stuff from the background, Brave New World from Huxley and lots of other novels back in the ’80s and ’70s, then this isn’t a new discussion. This is not a new topic. They want in general, many governments, they want from cradle to grave education control of it. Now they just don’t have it right now because they’re lacking funding in it at the moment, but they’re going younger and younger, pushing and pushing and pushing to get more funding for this stuff, so you see articles like this pop up because it’s a push for it. They want universal pre-k. Then of course, they use it as a scare tactic.

What’s called the preschool-to prison pipeline and they’re saying we need to get … The government needs to get it down there into preschool because if we don’t get preschool right, then all these people are going to prison. The interesting aspect of it is that I agree with that to a large degree, meaning that child development has everything to do with how they develop later. The bible has a lot to say about that in raise up a child and the way you should go. When he is old, he will not depart from it. Now if you train a child to disobey authority, you train a child that he can do whatever he wants, what do you think you’re going to get when they get older except a person who doesn’t listen to authority and does whatever they want.

That’s the definition of a criminal. There is something to this concept of a preschool-to prison pipeline, but it’s not the direction that they’re spinning. They have a non-biblical viewpoint on this. I just want to touch a few things. I’ll read a few points to the article. I’ll post the article link on the website as well in the description and what not. You can go to yourself and read the article because if you haven’t read stuff like this, you should and be informed about what people are saying.

I want you to be informed about how to read it properly because if you just read what these people who claim to have PhDs or been doing research and all the rest, these are the column specialist, if you just swallow it and you don’t give it the common thought that it needs, then you’re going to be missing the boat. You’re going to be fooled by a lot of people just because they have a fancy title. As Christians, we need to be discerning people. As a parent, you need to be a discerning person. Sadly, I’ve talked to a lot of people and that’s as far as they get. They hear the word research, they hear the word PhD, they hear a fancy college, they hear the word specialist, and they do swallow everything.

If you try to tell somebody that what a specialist has said is not true, they will flat out not listen to you. They’ll ignore you because they bought into the idea that if a person has the concept, they call themselves a specialist, or they have a PhD in developmental psychology, or they’ve been at a fancy college and they’ve been doing research, they never really question the nature of the research. What made them a specialist? Who said that developmental psychology, the PhD, is worth anything? If their basis for the child is not biblical, then I don’t care what kind of PhD they have because they don’t properly understand the child. What they’re doing is they have a PhD in a fictional character that’s not real human nature.

You need to have a discerning idea for this, but let’s jump into some basic things that the article said. Then of course, we’ll post the link to it so you can go there and read the article for yourself if you’d like. We should be discerning people when we read these things and catch on some of the things that they’re saying. Let’s jump into just a few quotes from the article itself and the article being “We Don’t Need More Pre-K, We Need Better Pre-K.” Let’s see what they mean by that. “Communities across the country support increasing public funding for pre-K education, but it’s not enough simply to provide it for more kids. All children need better pre-K. Our young children are in a precious position because we are in danger of not getting pre-K right.

When programs get it right, they are a boon to children and parents alike.” Now I agree with this comment for the most part. When we get pre-K right, we are a boon, we are a blessing to the parents and the children. When you don’t get it right, you are a curse to them. The sad part is is that humanistic education is not a boon to parents and it’s certainly not a boon to helping children. Now what they’re talking about here when they say better pre-K, what they’re saying is that we have to get it right. It means you have to have the right view. Now having been in this field for 17 years now and my wife for even more, we have a very intimate knowledge of what they mean by better pre-K.

What they mean better by is you have to have the right ideologies about the child, what they need, and all the rest. It goes back into the psychology we’re talking about here. This is a PhD in developmental psychology. Now these people don’t have a biblical view on it and therefore, if they have a Christian they’re talking to, a Christian preschool, which you are Christian teacher, then they are going to tell you that you don’t know what you’re talking about and you need to bow to the authorities on these issues, these psychologists, these PhDs. Basically you have to take the bible, toss it out, and listen to what they have to say. If you don’t, then you’re not going to get pre-K right. If you don’t, you’re not going to be helping the child.

You’re going to be not be a boon and this is what they’re really saying. What they’re saying is not only do we need universal pre-K, which is what they’re pushing for, they also want to make sure that it’s universal humanistic pre-K, universal humanistic preschool. All four year olds need a humanistic education. That’s what they’re really saying. Let’s jump to another quote. “But many programs are not doing what is best for children, studies show. Only a small percentage are so low in quality that they might actually be harmful to children.” Now many programs are not doing what is best for children.

If you are running a Christian preschool, if you’re a Christian teacher or if you’re a Christian parent, then you’re not doing what is in the best interest of that child according to these types of people. Now it sounds wonderful because they don’t tell you what they’re saying is best for the child. When you read an article like this, it sounds like you can agree with it, right, but that’s not something you can agree with because they’re saying here is this is that you can actually be harmful to them if you’re not teaching them correctly.

Now they mean, once again that we’ve had these types of people come into our preschools, inspectors and things like this, who have actually sat and seen bible time, us teaching The Ten Commandments to kids, and said that bible time was inappropriate and harmful to children. That means teaching The Ten Commandments and bible stories to children, preschoolers, was harmful and going to hurt them. Now this will give you an idea and put in perspective what they’re talking about here, they are wanting to make sure that humanistic education only is taught. If you’re not giving a humanistic education, then you are harming children. That’s what is really being behind all of these seemingly nice quotes.

It says here, another quote, “Just like young children, pre-K programs need to be supported, guided, and monitored if they’re going to do well.” You can read into this meaning that they need to be a government licensed, they need to be government sanctioned. If they don’t have the stamp of the government, then they’re not going to be good because they’re not guided and supported by government institutions. Now this is the problem that all preschools are facing right now especially Christian schools. If you’re thinking of being a Christian teacher or being an owner of a Christian school, this is something you’re going to have to pay attention to because this is what they want. They want to have absolute control over the school.

That means they’re going to support, guide, and monitor you to make sure you’re not giving a Christian education. That is what’s being really said here. It sounds goods, being monitored, support, but that’s really not what’s being said in reality. Another quote here is, “We know an impressive amount about what makes a pre-K program successful thanks to decades of research.” In other words, back to the authority again, coming back to the fact “we’ve done lots of research. We know what’s good for kids.” Once again, all their research says that children do not need to be taught the bible and do not need to be taught The Ten Commandments. In fact, it’s harmful to them. That’s what they’re research is saying. They’re saying, “We know we have an impressive amount of research.

We know this is what it is.” It sounds like, if you’re just listening to what they’re saying, it doesn’t sound terrible. If you’re in the field and you know what these people are talking about, you know what they’re really saying, then you have to be discerning and understand that what they’re saying is all their research says you can’t teach Christianity. That’s what they’re really saying. They’re saying that it’s harmful to them and it should be avoided. Let’s go ahead and jump to the last quote here. “Although teachers are at the core of any strong pre-K program, the most successful ones also have support staff such as specialists for children who have developmental delays and severe behavior challenges.”

Now these of course are people who have been trained in humanistic ideologies and what is best for what’s considered to be challenging or severe challenging behavior. This sounds great, support staff, challenging behavior, et cetera. What they do is they come back and say is this and is that. There’s a link on the article to a news interview they did with a parent of the preschool-to-prison pipeline. It was discussing what challenge and behavior was. It kind of gives light on the article itself, what they mean by challenging behavior. The parent was saying that the three year old had been suspended from preschool for refusing to listen to teachers and becoming violent and hitting the teacher and had been suspended for hitting the teacher.

The news anchor and the mother both thought this was ridiculous and that this is normal child behavior. No child should ever be suspended or have any penalties for hitting the teacher. This comes back to what we said a minute ago and we’re going to wrap up pretty much with this. The preschool-to-prison pipeline. Their idea of how to fix that, in other words, listen to these experts that do not have a Christian basis. The way that they fix challenging behavior is not to deal with the root. The root of it is helping the child learn through proper rewarding and proper discipline of children. They learn self-control. The positives and the negatives, balance it out properly like a parent would and also in the school system.

Now if you do that properly, the child learns self-control. Then later on as they leave preschool into elementary levels and middle school and high school into the workforce, they’ve develop character, biblical character, where they have an understanding of their responsibilities before God to be self-controlled person. Now their ideas are to change the standards, to lower the standards. Instead of saying it’s unacceptable to hit a teacher, it’s just saying, “Well, let’s provide something to … You should not be able to suspend somebody for hitting because that’s okay behavior.” What does that do except set the child up for the fact that it’s okay to hit in preschool, so it’s okay to hit in kindergarten and first grade and high school and eventually guess where they go?

Prison. You can’t hit. They also changed the standards for doing other things, theft. Here in the news article, the news interview they did, that one of the principals, the superintendent I think of New York I think it was said that the children who were getting suspended for being defiant, they were not doing what the teacher had asked them to do. The superintendent had gotten rid of suspensions or lowered them to like, I forgot, three-fourths had stopped being suspended by lowering the standards basically. In other words, we’re not going to suspend people for refusing to listen to the teacher and therefore suspensions have gotten better. Well, what they consider to be better was actually worst.

If a child, if you’re allowing them as they go through preschool and middle school and high school never to listen to somebody, not do what they’re told, what’s going to happen when they’re an adult? They’re not going to listen to anybody. They’re not going to do what they’re told. That’s once again the definition of a criminal. What we have here, all these people who have PhDs reject what God has said. They reject the bible, reject any type of advice God gives concerning child rearing or how to deal with the behavior. They have their own research, their own humanistic research. That is how they’re going to make a prosperous person, a prosperous person, a prosperous family, a prosperous community, but they have it backwards.

Giving some of these ideas here, I hope that you’re seeing what we’re talking about here. We’re going to give more of these type of illustrations and more actual quotes from people, more information so you can see where this is going. This is a newly posted article. Once again it was just posted September 14, 2017. This is stuff you don’t have to make up. This is what they’re pushing for. They want universal pre-K. They want children younger and younger and younger.

The number one thing that they want these children to have is a humanistic education that is void of any Christian influence at all, which is why they want the monitoring, which is why they wanted them to be directed by people, the state and otherwise who can come in and make sure that they don’t get Christian influence, make sure they don’t get Christian education. As we just gave an example, their solutions for how to help children is to lower the standards. Instead of fixing the preschool-to-prison pipeline by giving the children proper child rearing, proper self-control, a proper foundation of biblical basis of morality, they’re going to basically say, “Well, we’re just going to stop asking them to do things. We’re going to stop asking them to sit down.

We’re going to stop disciplining them for hitting people and for stealing and for all the rest. We’re going to just stop disciplining for these things and then we don’t have to worry about the problem anymore.” Well, you didn’t get rid of the problem. You just tried to ignore the problem and act like it wasn’t one. You’re perpetuating, if not, making the preschool-to-prison pipeline worse. You’re not improving it. See, the Christians have the right idea. They have the answers, but of course because people reject God and they reject the bible, they also reject any wisdom he has, which is what happens in the Book of Proverbs. You have wisdom saying, “You’ve rejected all my counsels and so you’re going to be filled with what you’ve done.

You’ve rejected it, therefore you’ll be filled with your ways.” If we give our children the advice of these so called experts, we are going to get what we asked for. You’re going to get a bunch of children who go from preschool to adulthood with no self-control and the preschool-to-prison pipeline will be perpetuated, not fixed. Hopefully this has given you some things to think about. We hope you enjoy the new format for the Preschool Pioneers Podcast. We do thank you for joining us today and we hope that you will join us next week for another episode with new content and new information to think about. If you have any further questions about us or about any shows we have, you can go to our website, which is GCSApprenticeship.com.

From GCSApprenticeship.com, you can click on podcast at the top and select Preschool Pioneers. There’s some more information about our Preschool Pioneers Podcast on there in the GCS Apprenticeship website. If you are a person who desires potentially to be a person who would like to be a Christian school teacher or an administrator or own your own Christian school, lots of information on our website about how you can do that. Thank you for joining us and you guys have a blessed day. Thank you.

Radio Announcer: The Reconstructionist Radio Podcast Network brings to you a complete line up of podcasts where you will hear practical and tactical theology. Our desire is not simply that you consume our shows, but that you also live out your faith in every area of life. We can talk all day long about these things, but if we fail to put them into practice, then we fail as ambassadors of Jesus Christ our king. Subscribe now to your favorite Reconstructionist Radio Podcast Network shows or you can subscribe to the Reconstructionist Radio Master Feed where all of the content we produce, including the audiobooks and audio articles will popup as soon as they are available.

Don’t forget to visit ReconstructionistRadio.com to volunteer as a narrator or to partner with its ministry financially. May the Holy Spirit stir you into action for Christ and his kingdom.