(CNSNews.com) – Children as young as three years old should be in public pre-school programs, according to Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers (AFT), the nation’s largest teacher’s union.
 
The AFT “would love to see” children “from age three on” attending these programs, Weingarten told CNSNews.com last week during a teleconference about preschool curricula. “The research is completely conclusive of the issue that our brains develop faster between birth and five years old than they do pretty much at any other time.”
 
When asked if she thought that children that age would be better off at school than at home, Weingarten said: “Look, I think that when kids have great home situations, that is the best thing that can happen to them.”
 
But some children, she said, don’t have good home situations.
 
“That’s what we’re saying here,” she said. “It’s not pitting anything against anything, it’s about saying, ‘Let’s see when we can get kids to come to school’ and to use that opportunity.”
 
Former Assistant Education Secretary Susan Neuman said she thinks most parents will have no choice but to see their young children educated away from home.
 
“The reality is that most of our children need child care, regardless,” she said. “Many parents are lucky enough to be home for the day. But more often than not they will need child care.”
 
Neuman added: “What we’re talking about is how to create a quality environment for those children. It’s not enough just to have access. We need quality.”
 
However, Colleen Holmes, executive director of the conservative Eagle Forum, disagrees with Weingarten’s age-specific referral of children for public education.
 
“I just think it’s a concern that education professionals seem to be targeting a specific age, especially the very young age of three, at which they would like to see children in state-sponsored daycare,” Holmes told CNSNews.com.
 
Holmes added that some parents do have a need for others to educate their young children. However, she said, it is important for young children to be, if not with their parents, attending “parent-chosen caregiving settings,” such as churches or smaller daycares, where parents have an influence on their children’s values.
 
“It’s also very insulting to parents,” Holmes said of the arguments for earlier public education of children. “I don’t know any parent who isn’t concerned about what their children are learning.”
 
“The child and society is best served when the parents are empowered rather than it being mandated that the child goes into state-sponsored schools,” she concluded.
 
Comments by Weingarten and Neuman, among others, came in a Dec. 11 teleconference in which a panel of experts discussed a new report from the AFT’s Albert Shanker Institute, “Preschool Curriculum: What’s In It for Children and Teachers?”
 
While emphasizing the importance of educating children at an early age, Weingarten also said “content counts” in such education.
 
The report suggests that if education in language, literacy, math, and science is begun early and at the right age, it can have “large, long-lasting effects on preschool children’s social and cognitive skills.” The panel noted that such positive effects prepare the children for success in elementary school and, ultimately, in high school.
 
However, the panel also suggested an economic benefit from proper education of young children.
 
“There are many studies that have been done that show if you invest a dollar in early childhood programs now, you save from seven to 10 dollars later in things like high school dropout rates, crime, teenage pregnancy, divorce, joblessness,” Weingarten said.
 
“Ultimately, if we actually mean what we say about our kids really matter,” she said, “then this is the place where we have to invest funds even in a recession.”