Here’s a statement from John Edwards:

Preparing Every Child to Succeed: As president, Edwards will launch a national “Great Promise” partnership to give a quality early childhood education to every four-year-old in the country – starting with poor children in neighborhoods with struggling schools. To reach even younger children, Edwards will create a national “Smart Start” program that will improve child care and invest in child health.

Here’s the problem:

Everyone on earth could make this statement. Two things are nearly always the case: Mr. Edwards is not spending his own money; he’s dipping into the big national pond to empty it into a small idea pond. And secondly, he has no idea about what toes his national “Smart Start” program might step on.

In our own city, childcare, preschool, all day dumping zones for children fail to teach, so how can they participate in “Smart Start.” Locally as well as nationally, childcare is provided by people who don’t want to teach. Evansville Living Magazine has voted “the best childcare” place award to one of the worst offenders. Letters are apparently not age appropriate for the oldest children in care which is five years old. These children can’t hold a pencil, listen to a story, know what circle time is or color a picture.

When teachers lament a classroom of infants who are supposed to be kindergarten age, it’s no wonder. It’s no wonder kindergarteners are not ready to learn to read. It’s a national problem across the board.

This week we will enroll yet another child who is coming from “strictly daycare.” Strictly daycare places do not teach – anything.

Strictly daycare forces a toddler’s program on children yearning to learn. Children from the earliest age have a great curiosity to know. The ages between birth and big school is the time when children will learn the most in their whole lives. Stifling this natural child’s effort is tantamount to stealing his future.

When politicians vie for acceptance based on the assumption that “these places” will teach simply because it’s a good idea, a whole score of years have passed that have bred a notion in early childhood that teaching is a bad thing, and that’s no easy overthrow. In fact it’s not a good idea; it’s an idea that early childhood mogals despise.

The only way this is going to work is at a grass roots level. Parents have to begin to desire, inquire, and require that their day care, childcare, preschool dollar is actually offering their child more than a few toys on a busy floor.

Refusing to buy childcare that refuses to teach a child is the first real step to changing the foundation of early childhood.