If you were to ask me what the best years of my life were, I might have to think about it

for a while but in the end I would almost always say the years that I was in elementary school.
For me, those years were the peak of my childhood, and every time I think back on them Im
filled with nostalgia and happy memories. I went to a total of three elementary schools, and for
the purpose of this blog Ill consider elementary school as education between kindergarten and
5th grade, even though I know that range is different for a lot of people from different school
districts. This age range, from about 5-11 years old, is a very interesting time in a persons life.
It is the time when, I would argue, kids are the most innocent and learning more than they ever
have about the world, both inside and outside of school. It is also a time when kids are, on
average, more accepting of others than at any other points in their lives. There were certainly still
well-defined friend groups during elementary school, but at least from what I experienced, these
groups originated more out of mutual interests than out of intentional exclusions of others. On
the whole, though, everyone was willing to be friends with everyone else and the overall
atmosphere was very positive and inclusive.
Moving beyond the social aspect though, obviously one of the most important functions
of elementary school is to build a foundation of general knowledge and classroom experiences in
order to prepare students for the rest of the time that theyll spend in school. Elementary school
experiences can be largely determined by a childs experiences from before they entered formal
schooling, as I mentioned in the last post; pre-school and familial background are huge in
determining how a student will succeed in elementary school. For example, I went to pre-school
for two years and every weekend I would beg my older sister to play school with me, where
she would teach me how to read, write, and other information that she had learned from
elementary school. Thanks almost entirely to her, I was able to read at the age of 4 and as such, I

had no problem transitioning into kindergarten and 1st grade where reading was a required skill. I
remember one of my best friends, Peter, didnt have such a solid background, and struggled a lot
with all of the reading that we had to do. Whenever I went over to his house to play, I would
practice reading with him to help him keep up, but it was always a struggle for him.
What I think that elementary school did best, at least in my experience, was inspire a
passion for learning. I wouldnt say that I particularly enjoyed any of the specific lessons or
assignments from elementary school, but what I loved was just being there and learning new
things. I still remember the paper that I wrote about octopi in the 3rd grade and I can still recite
almost every single word of the multiplication table songs that I learned in 4th grade. There was
something about elementary school that was just fun: learning for the sake of learning, being
taught by the same teacher with the same group of students for math, then history, then English,
playing wall-ball during recess; everything about elementary school just felt fresh and exciting,
and I remember being happy almost every day.
One of the biggest factors for this, in my mind, was the de-emphasis on personal
performance and the focus on learning, not evaluations. I would certainly push myself to get
+s in every class, and I couldnt sleep the night before I found out whether or not I would be
placed in the higher-level math class in 5th grade, but for the most part, there were no quizzes,
tests, or major projects to worry about. Everything that we did was just to backup and enforce
what we had learned, and it didnt feel like there was any particular objective. This is a stark
contrast with high school and college, where classes are just a desperate 50 minutes of notetaking to try and soak up as much information as possible before cramming 8 hours of studying
into the weekend before a midterm.

Another reason for the quality of elementary school, at least the quality that I
experienced, is the quality of teachers. According to a MSU study, the quality of teachers from
kindergarten through 4th grade can have a significant and lasting impact on reading and math
skills. These primary teachers are largely responsible for how a student will respond to future
education and for establishing the ever-important base of information that a student builds all of
their future knowledge on.
One of the most interesting questions surrounding elementary education is how it should
be balanced between the high performers and the low performers, who begin to differentiate
themselves during these formative years. In the US, where No Child Left Behind is a reality that
all public schools follow, there is a heavy emphasis on maintaining an equal floor for all
students. In the US, for the most part, those who are at the top of their class and at a level above
their peers will just have to wait for everyone else to catch up to them. This is one of the most
important reasons behind the facts that are constantly thrown around that American schools are
average and that we should be doing more. The US does, in fact, spend more per student than
almost any other country, but also spends equal or greater amounts of money on disadvantaged
students, which is unique to just the US, Israel, and Turkey. So how does American primary
education improve? Should we focus on the top performers, move them to better schools with
better teachers, and start giving them more rigorous education and testing at a younger
education? Should we keep on working on balancing out the inequalities in the nations schools,
making sure that every district has the same basic standards? These are questions that must be
addressed in the near future; education reform in the US is coming, and how lawmakers decide
to balance it will affect the nations students for decades to come.

Sources and additional reading:

http://www.ed.gov/blog/2010/12/international-education-rankings-suggest-reform-can-lift-u-s/
http://www.mlive.com/education/index.ssf/2011/08/msu_study_good_elementary_teac.html
http://senecaacademy.blogspot.com/2012/01/why-are-preschool-and-elementary.html