From an article at Psychology Today     >     >     > Many preschool and kindergarten teachers have told me that they are extremely upset—some to the point of being ready to resign—by the increased pressure on them to teach academic skills to little children and regularly test them on such skills.  They can see firsthand the unhappiness generated, and they suspect that the children would be learning much more useful lessons through playing, exploring, and socializing, as they did in traditional nursery schools and kindergartens.  Their suspicions are well validated by research studies. A number of well-controlled studies have compared the effects of academically oriented … [Read more...]