learning, and schools are ready for children”( USDHHS 2022). Indeed, what it means to be ready to learn is ever evolving as the concept responds to biological, environmental, and social forces, as well as advances in understanding how children construct knowledge( Graue 1992). Ultimately, as noted in the previous section, productive learning experiences involve the biological child’ s meaningful engagement with all environmental and social experiences, including in family / community contexts and in school.
Bowman’ s vision of a relation‐based teaching model includes teachers helping children to actively treasure their home and community contexts— however distinct from the school’ s context— while at the same time helping them meet school expectations.
Bowman did not question the idea that children go to school to learn many new things. But the long‐standing half‐truth of the school readiness construct is twofold. First is the underlying assumption that a state of unreadiness to learn is even humanly possible.“ Don’ t all children learn before they get to school? They are always learning”( emphasis hers). The fact is, however, they may not learn the way they are being taught. She challenged the idea that Black and Brown children and children from families with low incomes are not pre‐primed to learn in school( personal communication, 2022). Second, the school readiness construct is defined by White, Western, middle‐class paradigms about early learning that are not universally valued, such as children’ s acquisition of an independent, agentive approach to learning. By contrast, many families and communities place more emphasis on mutuality and social involvement with others. Others do not have the resources to play an active role in cultivating academic skills or independent behavior. Trips to the library, attending family‐teacher conferences, providing healthy snacks, and other measures of family involvement are not realistic expectations of all families; however, this does not mean these families do not possess high educational aspirations for their children( Bowman 1992). They too send their children to school with the expectation— and hope— their children will not only learn more than they already know, but what schools specifically want them to know across the school day( personal communication, 2022; emphasis hers).
Teachers and schools must recognize that some of the usual expectations of prior skills and knowledge are unfamiliar to some groups of children. These run the gamut from the physical( sitting cross‐legged and still in circle; dressing oneself) to the social( working independently; no teasing), and from general knowledge( different kinds of animals; counting to 10) to specialized knowledge( names of geometric shapes; what astronauts do). Bowman also was alarmed by the way in which many early learning standards and standardized assessments suggest all children can and should be learning the same thing, at the same time, and in the same way based on their chronological age. The expectation hides gross inequities in the data: Obviously they do not, as suggested by the perennial achievement gap news. But to blame the children and their family / community contexts for failure to meet one-size-fits-all standards when they enter school is inexcusable in Bowman’ s view. She argued,“ What we need to do is to help lots of people understand the difference between development and education, that children can be developmentally competent and still fail in school because they don’ t know the kinds of information that schools need them to know”( personal communication, 2022; NIEER 2023).
44 Young Children
Spring 2026