A program built for children at risk of being left behind

HighScope began under the early childhood educator David Weikart, who wanted a serious education to reach children already at high risk of not finishing a basic course of study. In the United States of that moment, poverty was already repeating itself across generations when school failure started early. The well-known Perry Preschool work in Ypsilanti, Michigan, served African American children living in poverty; Weikart believed the strongest learning appeared when children were interested and took the work up of their own accord.

A Korean essay on the program keeps that origin in view. Early childhood, it argues, is a short stretch that keeps shaping a life, so the method a child meets there is not a small choice. The point is not to decorate a classroom, but to treat the child as someone who can think and learn as an agent, not only as someone to be filled.

Piaget in the background, not on the stage

The same essay names Piaget’s theory of cognitive development as the ground under that bet. A child, in that account, is curious, keeps meeting new experience, and grows when an old frame no longer fits. New information is not simply stacked on top of the old; the child works to make a more complex structure that can hold both.

HighScope takes that picture practically. Interest and spontaneous experience are not extras. They are the conditions under which, the essay says, learning has its best chance. Adults stay close, ask, and extend, but they do not replace the child’s plan with a script of their own.

Plan, do, review — and a caution about borrowing it whole

The curriculum, as the essay describes it, is offered to infants and to older preschoolers in forms that fit the age, yet the educational core stays the same: the child is the subject of the learning, and the setting has to make new experience possible. Parents who join the work can raise a child’s will to stay with it, and they can help a classroom find the resources it needs.

The daily sequence is three steps: plan, carry out, and review. That is the habit the program is trying to form — a child who can intend, act, and look back. The Korean essay ends on a modest caution. HighScope has strengths a Korean setting might need, and it also has limits. Bringing it in would take careful study, not a wholesale copy. A longer Korean version of this account is on CampusDown.

Sources

1. A student account of the HighScope program, following David Weikart, Piaget’s active child, and the daily habit of plan-do-review.

Last updated 15 November 2026