Legislate Preschools..Are You Kidding?

Email from George Lee

to Josephine Teo - Centric/YDU/SISEU
cc Vivian Balakrishnan, Ng Eng Hen
date Sat, Oct 17, 2009 at 6:34 AM

subject Legislate preschooling..Are you kidding?

Dear Mrs Teo,

A quick note to thank you for putting some sense into the argument of legislating preschooling, in the recent article in The Straits Times (dtd 10 Oct '09).

If every community issue which shows a 2.5% deviation from the population (in this case, 1 child out of 40 not receiving preschooling) is met with a solution that involves legislation, our Parliament will be rife with issues of all and sundry.

The so-called expert group may have confused the need to sharpen the arrowhead, ie 1 unified body for preschools, with the wood, and thus dragged in the lowering of compulsory school age and putting preschools under the government as the cure-all prescription for some of the preschool ills.

Together with Mrs Ng Gim Choo of EtonHouse espousing the need for children to be children (at 2 to 6 years of age) before the rigours of formal education kicks in, you have shown the need to not get caught up with the symptoms but to get to the "root cause".

I therefore thank you for lending your wisdom in that important article on preschooling, as the Chairman of the Education GPC.

regards,

George Lee (early childhood educator and parent)

Reply from Josephine Teo - Centric/YDU/SISEU

to George Lee
cc Vivian Balakrishnan, Ng Eng Hen
date Sat, Oct 17, 2009 at 7:31 AM

subject Re: Legislate preschooling..Are you kidding?

Thank you, George, for sharing your views.
It is healthy in a debate on important issues to have a diversity of views.
Whichever part of the spectrum we stand, I'm glad to see so many taking a very strong interest in early childhood education and caring to give their views on ways forward.

Happy weekend!