Sunday, June 19, 2011

Government receives the most “bang” for the preschool buck

There’s a study for all occasions and all occasions warrant a study. Otherwise, grant money would remain unspent. One study recently targeted preschool education, finding preschool classes provided benefits to students even into adulthood. Sound odd? Not really; many are the preschool skills that serve us in our latter years.

Counting to ten helps determine the number of fingers we have remaining after a day of sawing lumber. Identifying basic colors is essential to stopping, yielding, or proceeding at traffic intersections. And tying one’s own shoes is beneficial in both social and business settings. It also looks great on your résumé.

Such are the lessons from preschool. Still, the study’s proponents claim preschool gives taxpayers the “most bang for the buck.” Lead researcher Arthur Reynolds says preschool classes produce a $90,000 return on a $9,000 investment (the cost for 18 months of preschool). That’s not a shabby ROI. Most of us would take a ten-fold return on our 401k and never bat an eye. But when we take a closer look at the study’s statistics, the results seem mixed.

For instance, adults who had attended preschool earned annual salaries only $800 higher than those who didn’t. Just 5-percent were more likely to graduate high school, and only 4-percent were more likely to attend a four-year college.

Actually, preschools teach rudimentary lessons that were once taught at home, including homes with low incomes. The practice has eroded since the federal nanny state usurped the role of father in most such households. Preschool offers little to a child of average, or even slightly below average, learning ability. It does, however, remove children from the home, allowing politically correct education requirements to be instilled at a younger age.

I hate to sound like a soldier in the tin foil hat brigade, but I’m suspicious of government’s motives. Whenever a study touts the virtues of earlier government involvement in our children’s lives, the suspicions grow. A young mind exposed to the concept of government as a god-like provider learns to believe government’s function is to meet individual needs. Once those views are ingrained in the mind, a child will view government as the source of liberty and rights through adolescence and into adulthood.

Education has long been a tyrant’s tool. Hitler used education to indoctrinate the Hitler Youth. Stalin, too, leaned on education. The
Soviet leader called education “a weapon whose effects depend on who holds it in his hands and at whom it is aimed.” American preschools won’t likely turn out the next generation of Brown Shirts or Young Pioneers. But preschools can sell children an unrealistic vision of government and liberty.

Preschool’s benefits may well extend into adulthood. But benefits are more for the state than the child. Seldom in human history have governments served goal’s other than their own. Why believe government preschools break from tradition?

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