Pre-school

is  on the verge of becoming compulsory. 
No, nobody has yet announced it as a "policy" but it is clearly heading in that direction. The Opposition Leader has announced that there will be 15 hours a week for all children  under their proposed multi-billion dollar scheme.
Someone being interviewed about this said that,  unless children attended pre-school for those hours each week,  "they might never catch up". The strong impression was given that you now need to learn so much before you even start school that without pre-school you are going to be seriously disadvantaged.
I remember going to what was then called "kindergarten". I hated it. It wasn't just because of the very active nature of some of the games - a lot of them seemed to involved running and I couldn't join in -  but because it was noisy and you were told not just what to do but how to do it and when to do it. Even at the age of three I preferred to organise myself and do what I wanted to do in my own way and in my own time. I went off to school at age four. It was an improvement. There were more books to read at school.
I vaguely remember playing counting games, singing songs, listening to a story and splashing paint on sheets of "butcher" paper. I can remember the smell of that paint. It was mixed from powder. We had to wear our "painting aprons". 
Unless we did ourselves our faces didn't get painted. We were told to be "nice" to one another but we weren't taught anything special about the dark skinned aboriginal child who came or the boy who called the police "the garda". Both of them were just one of us. We had a Christmas party for all the children in the community - the churches banded together for that with the woman who ran the kindergarten.  Even the two Jewish kids turned up to that. I remember because it was fancy dress and I was dressed as a rabbit and they came dressed as a shepherd and shepherdess and wanted me to be a sheep instead. I refused. My paternal grandmother had made the rabbit costume - so that I could "hop" around the floor. 
We didn't need to know about computers, computer "games", "programming", multi-cultural days, discrimination, or any number of other things. Being country children we knew about sex, birth and death.  We sang songs now considered to be sexist and racist and listened to stories also considered to be sexist and racist. When we went to school we had more of the same. At school we mixed with children who had not been to kindergarten at all. 
I could read. Nobody else in the class could read. I read to myself and sometimes I would listen to other children stumble slowly over 
"This is Dick. This is Dora. Here is Nip. Here is Fluff" in the new Schonell readers. The teacher taught "phonics" and "nature study" - the latter didn't mention the words "environment" or "climate change".  We wrote our "daily diary" - a sentence in an exercise book with the "new word" at the back of the book. In my case that would, if the teacher had time to write it for me, often be more than one sentence with words I had to convince her I knew and even had some idea how to spell. I had to learn how to spell those words. I had to learn how to construct a sentence. Now, I am told, you just write things down and the spelling and construction doesn't matter. You can do it on the computer too. 
We had "Friday tests"and "marks". The Little Drummer Boy next door looked amazed when I tried to explain these things to him. "Everyone comes first now," he told me but with a look that told me he knew what that actually meant. 
At home we played outside, in the dirt and mud. We often made our own toys and "pretended" that leaves were "plates" and the box  outside the back door was the "oven" or, the  next day, a castle or tractor. 
We didn't need to be told what to do or how to do it all the time. We grew up anyway.
Yes, there's more to learn now. It's just that I wonder whether they are learning what they really need to know - and if they are growing up while they are doing it.