Academic & intellectual goals
Young children need more than early drills.
The original article reports on Lilian G. Katz’s distinction between academic goals and intellectual goals in early childhood education. It argues that the question is not whether academic skills matter, but when they matter and how much of the early curriculum they should occupy.
- Academic goals.These include discrete early literacy and numeracy skills, often practiced through drills, worksheets, memorization, and exercises with expected answers.
- Intellectual goals.These engage reasoning, questioning, hypothesizing, predicting, analyzing, aesthetic sensibility, and the pursuit of understanding.
- Skills become meaningful in inquiry.In-depth projects can motivate children to use literacy and mathematics as tools for investigating and sharing ideas.
- Long-term learning matters.The article describes research suggesting that child initiative, interaction, social-emotional learning, and intellectual engagement may support stronger long-term outcomes than premature formal instruction.
This page closely paraphrases Valerie Strauss’s 2015 Washington Post article, previously published on Laurelwood’s site, reporting on work by Lilian G. Katz and Defending the Early Years.