When Slow Is Fast Enough: Educating the Delayed Preschool Child [Paperback]

Goodman. (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: March 12, 1993

"Fascinating, lively, well-documented, and challenging....Both timely and necessary....An ideal resource for professionals who work with delayed children. It is so readable, it will also be valued by parents of these children." --Lee Combrinck-Graham, M.D.
In matters of education, are all children created equal? Despite reforms that champion the rights of handicapped youngsters, are we really punishing such children with the very systems that are supposed to help them?
Joan Goodman's bold and controversial book asks what we are accomplishing in early intervention programs that attempt to accelerate development in delayed young children. She questions the value of such programs on educational, psychological, and moral grounds, suggesting that in pressuring these children to perform more, and sooner, we undermine their capacity for independent development and deprive them of the freedom we insist upon for the nondelayed. Goodman argues that we need a more tolerant, less directive model of instruction in which the aim is to support the child's natural and spontaneous, albeit slow, development and to stimulate individual processes of discovery and self-expression. The elements of this more supportive model are then described in detail.
Raising fundamental questions about our ambitions for children and how we fulfill them, this lively and provocative book is bound to stir controversy. It is especially timely as early intervention programs rapidly gear up to serve all handicapped children from ages 0 to 5.

Editorial Reviews

About the Author

Joan Goodman received her bachelor's degree from Radcliffe College and her doctorate from The Harvard Graduate School of Education. For the last thirty years, while her career has combined the practice of child psychology with writing and teaching, her abiding interest has been the challenges that preschool children with developmental disabilities present to parents, teachers, and the science of psychology. She has written over 30 chapters and articles on the diagnosis of, and intervention with, this population. She is the author of a novel nonverbal assessment instrument, THE GOODMAN LOCK BOX, and has recently completed a series of videotapes on families raising handicapped youngsters. While in charge of a psychological diagnostic unit for preschoolers at The Children's Hospital of Philadephia, Dr. Goodman started an early intervention program which she directed for seven years. Currently she is Associate Professor at the Graduate School of Education, University of Pennsylvania.

Product Details

• Paperback: 306 pages
• Publisher: Guilford Press; 1 edition (March 12, 1993)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0898624916
• ISBN-13: 978-0898624915
• Product Dimensions: 8.8 x 5.9 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.1 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (5 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,402,342 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

10 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars the best philosophy i've read on this subject, January 23, 1999

By 

[e-mail] (Los Angeles, CA USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: When Slow Is Fast Enough: Educating the Delayed Preschool Child (Hardcover)

The book contends that the current process of force feeding specific developemental goals into children who are already having a hard time meshing into our fast paced society, may do more harm than good. I agree with the general theory that true learning can only be acquired through individual discovery, trail and error, rather than repeated drilling and very little if any chance for exploration. My only question is WHERE does this scenario exist for our handicapped children???

9 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Essential reading, August 30, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: When Slow Is Fast Enough: Educating the Delayed Preschool Child (Paperback)

Goodman's detailed observations of "early intervention" projects and her thoughtful and historically-informed analysis suggest powerfully that the current policy of trying to accelerate "delayed" children in order to keep up with their non-disabled peers, in fact prevents them from learning and exploring at their own pace. She painstakingly documents the way in which unrealistic expectations and demands lead to a situation in which almost continual prompting, directing, "cheating" on behalf of children, and even straightfoward physical manipulation are used to get children to "go through the motions" of a "normal" schedule, regardless of their incomprehension or lack of interest in it. A subtle, restrained book which quietly demolishes educational orthodoxy on this topic.

7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Excellent Book in the right hands., August 23, 2006

By 

Wendi (One of the Great Lakes States) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)   

This review is from: When Slow Is Fast Enough: Educating the Delayed Preschool Child (Paperback)

And *parents* are the right hands. We have to live with and support our children, and in the cases of the developmental disabled, we are talking about a lifetime. Parents get the final say because we love our children and see them in the real world daily.
As Ms. Goodman notes, 'only an extraordinarily ingeneous teacher can be child-directed and flexible, yet conform to an IEP law.' She also notes that The 'cultivated eye' of educationists is trained by a schoolish set of standards about what is 'good.' It is not surprising that parents would approve of this book.

Until we adopted her, our own disabled child was in just such a program and interventionist system such as Ms. Goodman describes unfavourably- they thought it more important that she do tasks that were to her both useless and meaningless- count by rote, do a simple puzzle, sort objects by shape, identify pictures of matching socks.

The retarded, especially the severely retarded, as our daughter, do not transfer what they learn in one arena to another- matching photographs of socks means little to my daughter, and it doesn't help her figure out how to match real socks. She can't talk and she is developmentally about two- counting by rote was not only inappropriate for her developmentally, it is meaningless to a child who will never be able to live without constant care. Setting the table (which we taught her), dressing herself, choosing matching shoes, playing pat-a-cake, singing simple songs, these were things that meant more to her and had more value to her.

This book, along with Jane Healy's book about your child's developing mind, is an excellent guide to natural learning that respect the child as a person.