GoCause at Jumpstart: How Early Childhood Education Can Rescue American Literacy

"There is a problem with America's education system." Such a statement is neither enlightening nor specific enough to come as anything other than a reiteration of what many people across our nation already know: the United States' public school system suffers from sub-par curricula, all-time low literacy rates and massive, all-too-frequent budgetary cuts that put to death extra-curricular "luxuries" like theater programs and sports teams.

Last month, however, I was encouraged when GoCause paid a visit to Jumpstart, a nonprofit organization based in Boston with a profound national reach and a founding philosophy that has already ensured the betterment of more than 70,000 young people's lives over 17 years. During the hours spent with the Jumpstart staff, it became apparent to my crew and me that their mission -- to provide children from lower-income neighborhoods with a "jump-start" into their education -- offers the strongest, most moving glimpse of a brighter, better American future I've yet come across.

Jumpstart brings community volunteers and college students together with preschool children to work on year-long, individualized tutoring and mentoring programs, each program aiming to propel the volunteer's "partner child" forward on his or her road to becoming a successful reader. One of the most important goals of the organization is to make sure that by the time a child begins kindergarten, they can already read at an age-appropriate level; the most important years of development in a child's life, I learned from my visit, are those pre-kindergarten years when their mind is most ripe for learning, molding and maturing.

Early childhood education is an essential part of our collective development as a nation. American children have suffered for too long without the proper support, victims of a domino effect most evident in our poorest communities. The fewer books a family owns, the less likely a child will be to read at age-appropriate levels in his or her lifetime, and the less and less literate that child becomes, his or her chances of ending up unemployed or imprisoned increase tremendously. Jumpstart's reading and tutoring programs are essential to creating an interactivity with books among young readers and a national commitment to making books available in every home. They are showing us all the way to a better future where American youth will provided a proper education that can allow them to succeed and compete with the best minds from all around the world. Let's follow their lead, shall we? And while you're at it, go to www.jstart.org to find out more.

For the first time in American history, as the powerful trailer for Participant Media's upcoming documentary "Waiting For 'Superman'" informs us, "...this generation will be less literate than the one before it" (http://www.waitingforsuperman.com/trailer). Jumpstart is helping to reverse this trend, and if I've learned nothing else from my experience with this lovely organization and its incredibly kind and sweet-natured staff, I've learned to leave you, dear readers, with this one command: GO FIND A YOUNG PERSON YOU LOVE AND READ TO THEM!

A child's mind is a terrible thing to waste.

Check out the video of our visit to Jumpstart:

 

Follow Matt Hooper on Twitter: www.twitter.com/@mattyhoop