Someone on one of my Internet forums alerted me to Rush, Little Baby, a Boston Globe article of a few months back. As articles critical of academically-oriented education for young children, it's a pretty good one, covering many perspectives and giving fair space to the opposing view.
It's still frustrating.For all that it's a long trek through the article, I finished the trip feeling more as if I had been on an If It's Tuesday, This Must Be Belgium tour of Europe: sound bites rather than substance. And though I have criticisms myself of some of the ways preschool children are taught, they naysayers in this article are generally setting up straw men to knock down.
The case of William Sidis, for example, is a tired old chestnut, full of half-truths, and in any case there are plenty of reasons to account for his problems without blaming his precocity.
I've written before on the problems with the Baby Einstein study.
Phonics instruction is important, and those who never learn to sound out new words are at a distinct disadvantage as readers. I've quarreled often enough with schools that teach reading by the infamous look-say method. But the article's assertion that those who learn to read that way can't really read is ludicrous. Poor as it may be, that's the way I learned to read, and I'm an excellent reader, having figured out (enough) phonics along the way. More to the point, I'm sure the author doesn't really mean to imply that Chinese, Japanese, and other speakers of non-phonetic languages aren't really reading....
Studies purporting to show that children who are advanced when they
enter school generally lose their advantage in a few years will remain
unconvincing as long as most schools offer little or no opportunity for
such children to continue to blossom, but instead encourage them to
become bored and complacent.
I'm very tired of making that point, but apparently it needs to be made over and over again. (Martin Luther, on being asked why he preached on justification by faith every week, responded "Because you forget it every week.")
Most of all, I'm frustrated by the false dichotomy that is always being presented. Of course sitting on the floor with your child and building block structures together is a good thing, as are creating puppet shows, snuggling on the couch reading together, cooking dinner, and a host of other activities. But why are these things always presented in opposition to showing your child pictures of art works, or butterflies, or words, or mathematical quantities, or introducing them in other ways to the lively world they will later "study" as academic subjects? The people I know who do the latter also do the former, probably more than most. I'm sure there are those who plop their kids down in front of "brain-boosting" DVDs or TV shows for hours on end and call it education, but that's no one I know, and even if it were, a few bad apples don't invalidate a practice. I'll grant this: IF one only has time to build block castles with a child, OR show the child pictures of art masterpieces, but not both, I'd take the blocks. But that's a foolish premise, an impossible situation. Whoever needs to make that choice?
If you have time, check out the Doman Inspired Parenting blog. I have issues with some of Timothy's parents' choices for his upbringing—not that it's any of my business, but so you know I'm not holding them up as paragon parents. Nonetheless they've done an absolutely amazing job. A most intense program of the kind derided in the article, with plenty of activities of the kind promoted (check out their ExploraZone!), the parents also managing a job and a half plus grad school...no, these aren't the Incredibles, but they certainly show the foolishness of the above either/or dichotomy.
Parents should share God's wonderful world with their children in a variety of delightful ways. All else is commentary.
