Have Early Childhood Special Education Programs Finally gone too Far?

Do you remember that old Jodie Foster movie Little Man Tate in which her little seven-year-old genius son goes to college? Well, seven is kind of old by today's standards. No, really! These days, there are four-year-olds being sent to early childhood special education programs at colleges to get a head start on their academic lives. Why, you ask? It's because colleges happen to be really strapped for funds and they want to do whatever they can to sell their services to as many paying customers (they aren’t called students anymore) as possible. And programs of this kind are different from the college summer programs that high school students have been able to take advantage of for years.

Parents with kindergarten-aged children who feel that their tots are destined for big careers in medicine, the sciences or anything these days, sign their children up for these early childhood special education programs that charge anything from $250 a week up to something that's ten times as much.

So do these courses actually help provide children with the stimulating environment as parents hope or are little genius children the only ones who are able to take any advantage of them? Education counselors are pretty sure that early childhood special education programs don't actually harm anyone. But they aren't so sure about the benefits to your average child of being placed in this kind of environment.

But no matter because these summer programs have become spectacularly popular among ambitious parents. Summer engineering programs for elementary school children happen to be the best-received. Places like Georgia Institute of technology and the University of Virginia have to process twice as many applications as they have places for.

These courses though, happen to be of the limited usefulness. A college-bound kid can hardly put this down on his college application. They don't ask for anything you do before ninth grade. People who are critical of these special children's programs claim that colleges are merely trying to make a quick buck and ensure that they can win a soft spot in a child's heart and that this will work in their favor when the child is actually out looking for a college 14 years hence.

But parents, while they may be a bit wary of the college course for four-year-olds, are pretty certain of the advantages there are in a summer course for 15-year-olds. College, then, isn't far away. And children can really hope to gain something that they can carry with them for use when it is really time for college.