Why a Proper Elementary Education is Important for Children?

Elementary education in the United States has an interesting history. During the elementary school's drastic evolution from the one-teacher, single-room schoolhouses to the comprehensive, multiple-grade campuses of today, our American forefathers unfailingly espoused to promote and preserve ideals such as freedom, democracy, and social civility for future generations through elementary education. They also recognized the gravity that a whole community can contribute to a child's spiritual, emotional, social, and academic growth, and urged communities to work toward developing intelligent citizens capable of solving the problems common in adult life. Their work was largely influenced by a number of childhood education philosophers, and despite the trends in the last few centuries, elements from these theorists are fundamental in the contemporary elementary school curriculum, instructional methods and delivery, and service framework.

Numerous childhood philosophers, education scholars, laws to secure the welfare of children, litigation decisions, and issues such as charter schools, privatization of public schools, bilingual education, home schooling, and high stakes testing have affected the evolution of elementary education. But the two most significant issues to impact elementary education are integration of children of color and mainstreaming of children with special needs.

Enslaved Africans in our early history were not systematically educated. In fact, early campaigns for a school system to improve society and teach a common set of values excluded African and Native American children. Schools were for White children. In 1895, when the U.S. Supreme Court decided that the Fourteenth Amendment's (of the U.S. Constitution) wording “equal protection” could mean “separate but equal,” segregated education—separate schools based on race—was created. School buildings, teachers, equipment, and other conditions for African American children in segregated society were considered equal but were largely inferior to those of White children. The 1954 Supreme Court decision in Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas and later Title VI of the 1964 Civil Rights Act empowered the federal government to mandate desegregation of schools. This had a significant impact on elementary education, because as schools worked toward desegregation, teachers (at White schools) had to adjust to teaching all children, regardless of their skin color. At a time when many Whites believed that the African American children's lack of “cultural enrichment” would lower the standards of White children and Black children would harm the White children, teachers had the task of teaching all children how to live and work in ...