Misplaced Fears: Fact and Fancy in Standardized Childhood

Abstract

“No one is more susceptible to an expert’s fearmongering than a parent.” So notes economist Steven Levitt, who goes on to point out that parents often fear the wrong things because “the facts they do manage to glean have usually been varnished or exaggerated or otherwise taken out of context to serve an agenda that isn’t their own” (Levitt & Dubner, 2005, p. 149). Bruce Fuller’s Standardized Childhood is not a parenting book in the usual sense, but the modus operandi is the same, and Fuller places his book as firmly in this genre as he can by framing the book’s topic as “child rearing,” even titling his preface “Who Defines Childhood?” Reading beyond the first few pages reveals that this is, in fact, a book about the purportedly troubling government role in preschool education. From the start, the reader encounters toddlers barely out of diapers confronted by the threat of “one best system of childhood” (p. xi). The book’s central thesis is that a monolithic, bureaucratic state seeks to impose a centrally regulated, highly uniform preschool system on America’s children and families. It asserts that the state’s goal is to ensure “that all children speak in one exclusive language, read identical textbooks, and recite officially sanctioned knowledge” (p. xxiii). Ultimately, the state seeks to “disempower parents from the most essential human task of all: raising our young children” (p. xxii). Yet the evidence cited by Fuller indicates that compared with parents, preschool education, has, at best, modest effects on child development. Even if government could impose a centrally regulated, highly uniform preschool system on all Americans, it could not thereby displace parents as the most important influences on their children. And no one is attempting to do so.