This excerpt from Village Diary by Miss Read (Dora Jessie Saint) captures both my frustration with the disservice our educational system does to bright children, and my nostalgia for conversations that can be both contentious and contented. The speaker is a schoolmistress in a small, rural English village. The book was published in 1957, and the author was herself a teacher.
[We had] a most agreeable and stimulating argument about children's reading. Mr. Arnold ... maintained that children are not ready to read before the age of six, or even seven; and that all sorts of nervous tensions and eyestrain can be set up by too much emphasis on early reading.
I maintain that each child should go at its own rate, and that the modern tendency is to go at the rate of the slowest member of a reading group, and that this is wrong. There are, to my mind, far more bright children being bored and very frustrated because they are not getting on fast enough with their reading, than there are slow ones who are being harmed by too-rapid progress. I have known several children—I was one myself—who could read enough simply-written stories to amuse themselves at the age of four and a half to five. We were not forced, but it was just one of those things we could do easily, and the advantages were enormous.
In the first place we could amuse ourselves, and reading also gave us a quiet and relaxed time for recovering from the violent activity which is the usual five-year-old's way of passing the time. ... Secondly, the amount of general knowledge we unconsciously imbibed, stood us in good stead in later years. ... Even more important, the early poems and rhymes, read and learnt so easily at this stage, have been a constant and abiding joy. ...Thirdly, the wealth of literature written and presented expressly for the four to six age-group—the Beatrix Potter books are the first that spring to mind—can be used, loved and treasured to such an extent that is not possible to a late reader.
The battle raged with great zest. ... Mr. Arnold twinkled, and said I was a renegade, but that he must admit that he had seen no cases of nervous disorders in my school. And after school [we] enjoyed a cup of tea in my garden, among the apple blossom, with the greatest goodwill, each knowing that he would never convert the other, but content to let it be so.
