Is the investment in preschool education a waste of money? Not at all, according to David Kirp, professor of public policy at the Univ. of California, Berkeley. A RAND Corp. study confirmed what he already knew:

What is the effect of really only one year of preschool on society at large?

It’s really crucial in the development of children, and not just four-year-olds. We start with four-year-olds and preschool because that’s an important developmental place and a place where you can start talking about kids getting ready for school. But it’s also important to think about education earlier. It’s not as if the learning process begins magically with a half day of high quality instruction. Forty-five minutes after they’re born kids are tracking the movements of people.

At six months they’re perfect linguists. They can distinguish the pitch of every language, every tonal language, at two and three. Preschool is really a first step down that road.

So many people in America go to college, so many more than in other countries, and education is stressed so much in this culture. Why has preschool really been ignored?

It has a lot to do with the conservative ideology of the family. Preschool is the state takeover of the lives of the young and some of the politicians say, “Why stop there, why not grab the kid right out of the hospital and start educating them?” This is their way of suggesting the danger of more and more government intrusion. It’s only with the increased realization that what happens early in education lays an important foundation for what’s going to happen later, that preschool becomes an issue that more and more people pay attention to.