The sun shines through the row of windows that look out onto the patio, an area of artificial grass with a sandpit, flower pots and a ladder made of sticks and ropes. Inside, a child is drawing. After finishing his sheet of paper with blue lines, he adds green circles and a black swirl in the centre. He says it is smoke. The rest is a swimming pool and a house for fish and bears. Then he crumples up the sheet of paper, opens it and spreads it out again, proud of its reliefs. A girl next to him tears off the drawing and throws it in the rubbish bin. “Your mum won’t like it, you ruined it.” But the child gets up, picks up his drawing and raises his voice to say that he likes it.
“This competitive society only focuses on failure; it is a huge problem for emotional health,” laments psychologist Alberto Soler. “Do we wonder where the self-demand that teenagers suffer from today comes from? Why should a crumpled piece of paper be thrown away and considered worthless? He crumpled it because he liked it that way,” sums up Isabela Alcántara, a teacher in the Infant stage (3 to 6 years) at the Garabatos nursery school. Its two locations, in Madrid and Colmenar, are among the few remaining projects that support children up to six years of age. Recently in Madrid, despite the mobilization of families to retain the second cycle of infant school in school, one of the last public centers that included this stage from 3 to 6 was closed; Zaleo, in Vallecas. The rest of the country also maintains this trend.
Adapting spaces to movement
Why is it worrying that the 3 to 6 grade is being transferred to primary schools? Because, generally, “instead of the principles of that stage, where the foundations are established, permeating primary school, it is the youngest ones who have to adapt, pushing them to have experiences that do not correspond to them at a maturing stage,” explains Nuria Comonte, educator and part of La Semilla Violeta, specialists in active pedagogies.
In schools where 3 to 6 students are added to the space occupied by Primary and ESO, it can happen that their free play ends because the spaces are not the same as in a small school (frequently they are full of chairs, psychomotor skills are reduced and the playground is only reserved for specific moments). “The school must recognize children as people, not as human projects,” says Comonte. Soler reinforces the idea “it is a reflection of the competitive and demanding society in which we live.”
The photo does not surprise anyone, we compete from the age of zero to be the first to take off the diaper, to scribble, to read… And, later, the first in class, in the promotion, the person with the best performance, the most productive, the one who has the most likes…
“We put them in a race from a young age. Life doesn’t have to be like that because then we reap the consequences such as mental health problems,” insists Soler, author of Children without labels (Paidós, 2020). And precisely that comes from not working, according to the specialists, each evolutionary stage with the space and pause that is required. In addition, from not understanding the group as an organism with different rhythms and functions, capacities and needs, but as an individual being that is governed by the norms of the adult world; systems within a system.
“The collective is of little importance,” says Mar Hurtado, president of the Associació de Mestres Rosa Sensat —an association of pre-school, primary and secondary school teachers, connected by the purpose of improving our work as educators. “We are more creative because we can think together; we are braver because we are not alone, that message must be conveyed and it is not done,” she adds.
Exhaust the stage that corresponds to them
For Hurtado, the problem with the education system is that it skips evolutionary stages, which must exist and be respected in order to consolidate learning: “Learning should be part of a natural path where things happen, you analyse them, you touch them, you reproduce them. When a child has to grow up quickly, he first forgets the meaning of things, he learns them just because he has to. Here you lose motivation, which is so necessary, and the desire to learn.” These are two of the main problems found in primary and secondary education and which lead to mental health problems.
She prescribes the countryside as a vitamin from early childhood: “If you go out with the children, they will stop to listen to the noises in nature, to pay attention to the silence, to walk slowly; they will stop to look at the stones, their texture… This way you teach them to stop, listen, look, analyze, which then translates into reading comprehension.” Nature is the heart of the work of the biologist and educator. Katia Bone. “It connects them with their essence as living beings and allows them to develop free play to its fullest potential,” explains Hueso. In contrast, he adds that forcing a three, four or five-year-old child to sit in a classroom is a form of abuse: “They are people, they have not acquired the body schema, their body is not yet prepared for that.”
Brave and different, but not too much
The author of Nature takes care of us (2024, Plataforma Actual), also highlights the “contradiction” that exists between “being required to be entrepreneurs, disruptive, original… but never being allowed to be”. “Childhood is that unique moment where we can experience free play, where you experience life in a controlled and safe way”, Hueso continues, “if you don’t do it there, you will end up doing it at another stage where that practice of freedom will have worse consequences”.
The pause is another of the keys to this preschool stage. The psychologist Alicia Banderas It emphasizes the idea that, in 3 to 6 years, it is very important “not to overstimulate, because it makes it difficult for them to explore on their own, it does not respect their learning pace, it diminishes their curiosity and innate creative capacity, so important for, for example, learning to look for creative alternatives to solve a problem, instead of being obsessed with rigid thinking.” In addition, Banderas explains, “it leads to stress and demotivation.” Attention to emotions and comfort are also fundamental keys to this stage and the school must guarantee them. That is why this cadence is so important.
Attend to the emotion and validate it
“We must understand and make others understand that there are no positive or negative emotions; fear helps us protect ourselves, sadness helps us know how much we wanted something; they must know that we support them in their emotions,” Banderas reflects. Garabatos Nursery School They second this. “Children need to be accompanied by a gaze that does not judge, respects, waits, trusts, is present and understands that each rhythm is different,” explains Elena Romero Díaz, one of the directors, who regrets that there are increasingly “fewer spaces to form a tribe and where not only the child but also the family can be accompanied.”
Her partner, Cristina Llorente Jara, adds that when rhythms are respected, time is given and one is present, in a prepared space, the processes in each child occur. At her school, they dedicate one day a week to going out into nature and three days of psychomotor training are taught in a specific classroom. “In addition to time, we give them prepared spaces where they let themselves be guided by their desires,” Llorente emphasizes.
The speed of the world of adults
Does starting school earlier guarantee an improvement in academic level in the future? The specialists consulted agree that nothing supports this. Fernanda Bocco, a psychologist at La Semilla Violeta, explains that this paradox has its origin in the lack of critical capacity and the low level of reasoning detected in Secondary school. “At that time, we ask for more to be demanded in Primary school; but since there is no good cognitive capacity either, we put Preschool in school. It is not about moving forward, but about being in the stage that corresponds to them: play and physical, emotional and relational experimentation, which the educational system sees as wasted time,” Bocco sums up.
And this rush is transferred and does not seem to benefit. “A school is a fast, nervous place that wants immediate results,” explains Hurtado. “And that can cause children to become overwhelmed, stunned, and their learning to freeze. You have to understand what a three-year-old is, what needs and rights they have, and how the child is integrating into the routines of a school that they are not familiar with.”
For her, it is key to take into account children’s rights, and not just their needs: “Taking children to older schools to prepare them earlier for the terrible world that awaits them is a belief that exists, but there is no current of thought that says that, in fact, in a school that follows an older dynamic they will learn better and earlier.”
It is not necessary to read before primary school
Jordi Perales, a lecturer at the UOC’s Faculty of Psychology and Education, is outraged by this approach: “Anything that forces a student to do something they are not ready for is nonsense and a waste of time. We use Finland as an example, but there they wait for the right moment of maturity for each process (they read at seven years old). The sooner the better? No. When they are developmentally ready. Just as you don’t take out the cake before time or raise the temperature, with children you wait for the optimal moment for each thing. The curriculum does not say that when you finish Preschool you should read. Inspectors should pay attention to whether schools do this, to reduce the pressure that reaches families.” Perales also remembers that schooling is not compulsory until the age of six.
The term “play” is the most defended and repeated term. “It allows for endless development and maturity, but it is seen as wasted time,” repeats Bocco. “Time that could be spent on what, passing a competitive exam?” jokes Soler. In consultations, more and more frequently, he sees the consequences of “shortening childhood.” “Anxiety problems, a consequence of not having had that game as a main activity, we see less happy children.”
From La Semilla Violeta they add that “when children are pushed to stop experimenting with their bodies, what comes next on a cognitive level has nowhere to anchor itself. It is pure science, there is no room for discussion. “By teaching a child to learn without moving, we close their learning channels through neuronal connections; we repress and contain them,” reinforces the pediatric physiotherapist and osteopath Maite Mate.
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