Reply #22: This is madness [View All]

My mother is a former kindergarten teacher, and she hates this development. Not all children are ready to read at age five, and if they're forced to do so too early, they get frustrated and feel like failures--at FIVE.

Kindergarten was conceived as a way to teach children to get along in a group setting outside their family, work on their eye-hand coordination, increase their cultural and practical knowledge through hands-on and experiential activities, and to create a DESIRE to read. Teachers created a desire to read by reading interesting stories to the children, playing games that let the children develop their visual memory, and exercises that involved putting pictures in order to form a coherent story. In traditional kindergarten, children learned the alphabet and numbers and how to print their names in the last month of the school year.

About thirty years ago, the British school system ran an experiment where they introduced reading to five-year-olds at some schools. After a few years, they realized that any advantage the early readers enjoyed completely disappeared by age TEN.

That's right, if your kid learns to read at age five, s/he may be the star of third grade but will be just average by fifth grade.

Did you know that Finland, widely regarded as having the world's best school system, doesn't start reading instruction until age SEVEN? And their writing system is a lot more phonetic than ours.

All this talk about "Oh, our children have to compete" is bullshit.The best school system in the world does not teach children to read until they are seven.