Kindergarten’s lessons do seem to last
Many of us remember Robert Fulghum’s 1988 collection of his essays, All I Really Needed to Know I Learned in Kindergarten. It was on the New York Times bestseller list for two years, and through the 1990s was often the topic of conversation everywhere from school staff rooms to upscale cocktail parties.
Kindergarten teachers, in particular, were pleased to learn that it was they, not high-profile movie stars and politicians, who were the shapers of our culture.
Fulghum’s reservoir of essential knowledge included “share everything,” “play fair,” “put things back where you found them” and “clean up your own mess.”
For those of us as young adults in early or mid-career at that time, Fulghum’s kindergarten philosophy certainly resonated. We sometimes felt like Paul Simon’s One Trick Pony, who had to “Think about all these extra moves I’ve made and all this herky jerky motion … to get me through my working day.”
Fulghum’s advice to remember the lessons of kindergarten was reassuring: “Live a balanced life — learn some and think some and draw and paint and sing and dance and play and work every day some. Take a nap every afternoon.”
The big, wide world was a scary place for us sometimes, and when Fulghum advised: “No matter how old you are — when you go out into the world, it is best to hold hands and stick together” well, that was also reassuring.
All well and good, but was Fulghum’s treatise on how to live just another piece of feel-good hippie pop fluff?
Not at all, according to a report in the American Journal of Public Health. The report details a peerreviewed longitudinal study by Damon Jones and Mark Greenberg of Pennsylvania State University.
Jones and Greenberg examined whether kindergarten teachers’ ratings of children’s social skills, even given a degree of subjectivity, were in any way predictors of key adolescent and adult outcomes. The researchers assessed associations between measured outcomes in kindergarten and outcomes 13 to 19 years later.
What they found were statistically significant correlations between social-emotional skills in kindergarten and key young-adult outcomes across multiple domains, such as education, employment, even criminal activity, substance abuse and mental health.
The researchers concluded that a kindergarten measure or estimation of social-emotional skills might be useful for assessing whether some children could be at risk for deficit later in life in what are called noncognitive skills, things not learned from books and the standard curriculum.
Key findings included a challenge to the belief that it is good test scores that are the prime indicators of a child’s potential.
As an example, while almost all research finds a proven correlation between having a higher grade point average in high school and making more money in later life, Jones and Greenberg concluded that standardized test scores don’t tell us how many times or how effectively a kid worked with a study partner to solve a tough problem.
A second conclusion from the longterm study is that skills such as sharing and co-operating pay off in later life. Kids who related well to their peers handled their emotions better, were good at resolving problems and went on to have successful lives.
Kindergarten children who demonstrated greater social competency were more likely to earn high school graduation, were twice as likely to graduate with a college degree and were more likely to have a stable, fulltime job by age 25.
While Jones and Greenberg freely admit that the study has limitations (for instance, whether a teacher thought a child was poor, good or very good at a particular trait on the “prosocial” scale inevitably included some subjectivity), it became clear that social behaviour matters. Even at a very young age, ignoring the development of social skills could have significant ramifications for the development of anti-social behaviours at a later age.
Other conclusions reached in the study included the notion that, as the researchers wrote: “Success in school involves both social-emotional and cognitive skills because early social interactions, attention and self control affect readiness for learning.”
Perhaps that’s just more academic language expressing the same thought about kids at an early age that Fulghum had in mind when he advised teachers, parents and all of us: “Be aware of wonder. Remember the little seed in the Styrofoam cup: The roots go down and the plant goes up, and nobody really knows how or why, but we are all like that.”