No thanks to compulsory schooling from the age of three

In Sweden, over 13,000 people have now signed a petition against the proposal for mandatory preschool starting at the age of three. Behind this proposal lies an EU objective from 2002 aimed at increasing preschool attendance to remove barriers to women’s participation in the labor market. A new goal for 2030 is that 96 percent of all three-year-olds and 45 percent of all children under the age of three should attend preschool. Many parents in Sweden are upset about the state attempting to micromanage parental choices.

Text from the petition:
”The government’s investigator, Gulan Avci from the Liberal Party, is proposing compulsory schooling from the year a child turns three. We say NO THANK YOU! If the proposal passes, parents will no longer be able to choose home care or pedagogical care (such as family daycare or shared family care systems) for their children from the age of three.

When looking at how children’s language development is affected by preschool attendance, no positive effects can be seen — and this is due to several reasons:

1. Preschools in immigrant-dense areas often have staff who speak poor Swedish, or no Swedish at all, or who do not speak the child’s mother tongue, according to the Swedish Schools Inspectorate.

2. The first thing to suffer in large preschool groups is language development. And large groups are the norm in most Swedish preschools. Noise, stress, and too few staff who don’t have time to interact properly with the children make it difficult to support language development.

3. A study at the University of Gothenburg shows that preschools generally have low quality when it comes to language-developing activities.

4. Many children in immigrant-dense areas have a mother tongue other than Swedish, so they prefer speaking their native language with each other rather than Swedish, according to studies.

5. The majority of children with an immigrant background have attended preschool — yet they leave school with poor knowledge of Swedish and incomplete grades. That makes it rather embarrassing to claim that preschool provides good Swedish skills or better academic results.

The state does not own our children. According to the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, all parents have the right to choose the form of childcare that best suits their child. The Network of Stay-at-Home Parents (Hemmaföräldrars nätverk) says NO THANK YOU to compulsory schooling for three-year-olds! (And no thank you to compulsory schooling at all before the age of six).”

Link to petition against mandatory preschool from the age of three >>