We’re not in the US, but wrt Indigo’s post about preschool teaching vs play based learning and their relative advantages, our experience is that the absence of structured teaching in preschool is not an issue at all in today’s digital age. I was a time-poor working parent when my kids were young and their day care centres were entirely play based so DS started school not fully knowing the alphabet (which at the time was a great source of anxiety for me). Fortunately, iPads had just become available, so the year before he started school, we gave him his own with unlimited wi fi access. With this, he watched countless instructional YouTube videos on a broad range of topics. He arrived at the conclusion, just as he was starting school, that in order to properly pursue his interests he needed to learn to read and fortunately the school had a fantastic set up which suited him well. They were trialling completely open classrooms for their kindergarten cohort of 57 kids, supervised by three teachers, the same number of teacher’s aides and parent volunteers, to teach students in small groups based on abilities assessed in the first week.

Without knowing the alphabet, DS started in the very bottom group (the top group were fluent readers), but he was so eager to learn, he made rapid progress and was moved up every couple of weeks. By the end of kindergarten, he was the most advanced student in the year and past the highest formal level set for structured reading and so could read pretty much anything. Meanwhile, he had been surfing the internet and watching educational videos without regard for the level/age to which the contents were aimed, so his comprehension development matched his reading progress. Since then, he has been an independent self-directed learner and class work serves mainly as revision.