Skipping Grades and Customizing American Education

While I was in kindergarten we lived in a little town of about 600 people. Our local elementary school had no bus system; everyone was responsible for getting their children to and from school. At that point that I decided I would be a bus driver when I grew up. That way I could take everyone to our school. It would be so enjoyable. I did not realize I had potential to be more than a bus driver. I was simply seeking what I thought would bring the most pleasure to myself and others.

During that same time, I had many responsibilities in my kindergarten class. At story time, I read aloud to the class from the selected reader. I did not learn my letters in kindergarten. Being an eager learner, I was reading at an upper elementary level by my first day of kindergarten. I am not sure I learned anything in kindergarten other than how to relieve the teacher.

By the time I started first grade, we had moved to a new town in a different state. This school district had an excellent reputation. My first grade teacher, after only a few days with me, arranged for me to go into the neighboring second grade classroom for reading and spelling. Perhaps that would challenge me. The same arrangement was made when I was in the second grade, and I would walk halfway around the building for third grade one half of the day. I missed morning recess with my second grade classmates, and that was the only disappointment.

I had wondered what would happen when I got to sixth grade. Would I get to walk across the street to the junior high by myself? When I entered third grade, someone at the top decided that this was not the most beneficial way to educate me. My entire third grade year, I sat in the back of the class for reading and spelling and did individual advanced workbooks. I remained isolated from my peers and I was not challenged in the least.

To this day, I wonder what was the determining factor in stopping my progress? Surely it was not what was academically most challenging or beneficial for me. It was clearly what was easiest for the school.

Despite my once-held goal to become a bus driver, I became a teacher instead. Four years of teaching, and I am still unsure why students are grouped in classes the way that they are. Where else in life are people categorically lumped together based exclusively because of birthdates? Every pediatrician encourages new moms that their babies are normal as long as they roll over sometime before a certain age. Some babies have teeth at birth and others are toothless at ten months of age. Many babies are crawling by nine months, while others are already running, and some won't walk for another six months. This individual progress is considered normal for infants and toddlers, but once children reach school age they are expected to all meet the same marks at the same time. I am by no means asking for lower standards, but for the option of moving on once a standard has been achieved.

I am not exclusively concerned about the children that are at the bottom of the class. Dollars and programs abound to benefit the students that were once left behind. What draws my attention is the student that endures an entire grade with hardly a lesson learned. No new content is introduced to this child that is already reading well above grade level. Why is this child subjected to this monotony day in and day out? What does this achieve for the child, his peers, his teacher, or education in general? What is society afraid of in letting a child be a raging academic success at an early age?

Perhaps the number of above average students that drop out of school would be diminished if they were challenged. I am sure that part of the concern would be what to do with a nine year old that is ready to graduate high school. Our society is simply not set up to absorb bright children into the culture. We think that once someone has graduated high school they must get an entry level work position or begin undergraduate studies. Why do we limit our children in this way?

All these questions bring us into a view of public and private school education that is less than desirable. It begins to expose that schools serve the purpose of isolating children into peer groups for management purposes. Kids are kept off the streets and are given a mediocre education in return. Education is in no way tailored to the individual; rather it caters to the needs of the society to simply occupy its youth until they are of an age to hold a job. We tell ourselves that we cannot individualize education for every child, but allowing a child who can read at an eighth-grade level to learn at an eighth-grade level would require no new system only a change in structure.

Twenty-some years after kindergarten I wonder: what might have happened with my education if I never would have been subjected to an entire year of kindergarten?