I launched my medical practice in Montgomery County, Maryland, in March 1990. Because I’m both a medical doctor and a doctoral psychologist, my practice soon attracted parents who had concerns about how their kids were doing in school. Beginning in the mid-to-late 1990s, I began to notice a growing cohort of young boys who weren’t doing well in the classroom, who said they hated school, beginning in kindergarten. Parents were asking me why their sons hated school so much. As I learned more about each boy’s situation, I was surprised to find that our local public school kindergarten was now requiring children to learn to read and write.
I was surprised because when I was a little boy in kindergarten in Shaker Heights, Ohio, in the 1960s, we weren’t taught to read and write at all. We played duck, duck, goose. We sang in rounds. We did lots of arts and crafts. We went on field trips to the Shaker Lakes, where I splashed in ponds with my friends as we chased after tadpoles. By the end of kindergarten, I couldn’t read a word. I couldn’t spell my name. Neither could most of the other kids. Nobody expected us to—kindergarten wasn’t about learning to read and write. It was primarily experiential: singing, playing tag, doing arts and crafts, and splashing in ponds.
