Red(shirt) Start

The Cognitive Dissident skipped first grade.

He blamed all his social and academic travails that followed on that (although he no longer blames his parents; they’ve both engaged in serious self-flagellant penitence for years since. Basically they just confused prodigy and prodigal…but what Jewish parent doesn’t?)

As a result of my educational experiences, I have become a big fan of the opposite approach: “academic redshirting”, or holding children back a year at the beginning of school.

Now, according the front page bold-type article in Monday’s New York Sun, “’Lengthening Childhood’ Has Ill Effect: Harvard Study Details Costs of Delaying School.”

Just in time for my birthday—which was Monday—I have my most salient excuse for living pulled out from under me.

Not so fast.

The article details two specific concerns on the part of the researchers: one, that there is more of a chance that public school kids will drop out if they start later, and when they do drop out, it will be with one year less education. Two, starting later means one year less in the workforce, which means one year less salary.

The second concern is easy enough to parry. If redshirting has the effect it is supposed to, the time these kids spend in the workforce should be more productive, e.g. they’ll earn more and be promoted faster, thus canceling out the “lost” year.

The first issue is more complicated to deal with, but I will assert that the effect has less to do with the effect of the redshirting than it does with the way primary and secondary academia are structured. Aside from the obvious issues—the day is too long, the classes are overcrowded, the unions are communo-fascist —one might say the time has come to make the school system more like university education. This means that some kids should have lighter workloads, attend on a part-time basis, spread classes over more years, etc.

Until the system becomes more flexible among the aforementioned lines, the issues described above will persist. Which means the study’s conclusion about redshirting will always be inconclusive at best, and if a parent is weighing factors in whether to redshirt a child, taking this study into account would be of dubious value.