The highlight of my K-12 education was my Montessori kindergarten and 1st grade years in 1964/65. I remember learning constantly and having fun. Then it was on to a regular classroom. The learning crawled to a snail's pace and there wasn't much fun, but at least the cafeteria food was still food at that time, we still had recess and children didn't bring chaos from home. After retiring from a navy career, I subbed for 2 years. Things have changed.
As you know, Peter, I’m dismayed about all this. I want to add here my sense that this issue of pressuring kids to “achieve” has expanded during the post pandemic era. I see older students (middle to high schoolers) in my clinical psychology practice (and my own children and their friends) who are pushed to “make up” lost learning and power through academic and extracurricular demands, with no regard for the social losses and emotional traumas they experienced during the pandemic. After a year and a half of my adolescent daughter socializing only remotely, and then an additional year before her friends were willing to consistently socialize in person (it was as if they all felt too uncomfortable to actually be together), she finally fell into a rich social life with her peers, which brings her great joy! That should be as much a priority as her ability to solve algebraic equations!
I’ve seen this firsthand with my older child. She thrived in (private) preschool, which was play-based and had very caring teachers. She got to full-day kindergarten (in the same school!) and it was like she hit a wall. The children were expected to sit at tables for hours a day filling out worksheets. If they finished everything early, then they got to play. She was just starting to read, knew her letters but not enough phonics to break down all but the simplest of words, which I viewed as normal for a child who had just turned 5; apparently not! No, she was being asked to read and write at what seemed to me to be a first grade level. We were told to drill our child with sight words, which made us all miserable, so we relaxed and only did a little, because the idea of a 5 year old memorizing flash cards after a full day of academics was so obviously wrong to us! None of it was developmentally appropriate. She hated it, and began to show more and more anxiety and despair. In retrospect, I should have pulled her from kindergarten. I didn’t realize just how bad it was. School shut down in March 2020 due to Covid.
First grade (public) was fully remote in fall and winter; she was expected to be online 5 hours a day, reading independently. My husband and I did our best to help her with class while working remotely ourselves. Reading and writing were a huge challenge. Her reading skills were still below what the school wanted, but she was also one of the younger kids in her class, and I had done a bunch of reading about how children learn. It was obvious to me that she was simply not on the required “schedule” for learning to read, but that actually, the schedule ignored the normal ages for children to develop the necessary neurological development.
Around February they were able to go back to school in person, and around the same time, something “clicked” in her brain and she was suddenly reading much more fluently than she had been. This made a big difference in the speed she could write, as well, which helped with many other assignments.
She’s now finishing 4th grade and tests as reading at a 11th or 12th grade level, so apparently we were right that she just needed to get a bit older before her brain would be ready to read! She’s in advanced math and reading, and gets good grades. However, she struggles badly with anxiety and emotional issues, particularly around not finishing her work quickly enough. She gets overwhelmed easily. She has many friends, but doesn’t know how to deal with it when her friends don’t agree with each other. We really push play and socializing after school and have her in therapy. I’m so frustrated that between these inappropriate demands of the curriculum and Covid, she and her classmates have really missed out on the social/emotional development time that they need.
I’ve also got a younger child who will be starting kindergarten next year. We’ve got him signed up for half day kindergarten through our public school (our public district is still doing half day k, which isn’t the norm around here) and half day aftercare at the park district (because we need the childcare). I’m hoping that combination will be less developmentally inappropriate than the full day k we had our daughter in. I don’t think he’s going to be an early reader either, and I’m determined to do my best to keep him from feeling like a failure at 5. But I know from friends and neighbors that the curriculum isn’t that different. They’re demanding too much, as though just because some kids can read fluently at 5, all kids should be able to.
I'm seeing the results of this now at the high school level. Class discussion need to be forced, students won't voluntarily answer questions. Social media is their lifeline. Fewer and fewer students display any joy about being in school. More and more mental health and emotional insecurity issues. So much development is lost because of the move away from unstructured playtime during the school day in the early years. Ask any kid what their favorite part of the school day is - recess.
Such an important topic, thank you for addressing it! For those interested in the history of kindergarten, which is fascinating, here is a glimpse of it:
“Kindergarten was implemented by popular acclaim nationwide to give children a few short hours a day of valuable socialization and expose them to nature while stimulating their imagination, developing their moral sense, and hopefully burning off a little excess energy.”
The current standard for kindergarten programs involves about 10 minutes of outdoor play a day (if the weather is good and the children are behaving well) and the use of computers for learning. The gap between what we know children need and how we are operating is astounding! When will we ever learn? The future of humanity is at stake. Is anyone listening?
Reading all this I'm curious if there are teachers taking a harder stand than quitting. As in ignoring the rules and teaching instead what they, and a lot of us, understand is best for the children, or are the potential repercussions to great?
This is horrifying! It's been 40 years since I've been in school but I have no idea did it come to this. Who the hell's idea was is this? Why does anyone think that any of this is a good idea? Do they not have any kids of their own? If I were conspiratorially minded I would think that this was a plot destroy the well-being of America's children.
Did they copy this model from some other culture? Does it actually work to produce well rounded children in that culture?
The model looks to me like he was taken from a Chinese labor camp (or as they call them "Reeducation") which if I'm not mistaken are designed to destroy independent thought and well-being. And it has such a benign sounding name: "common core".
The way I see it (as well as many ECE researchers) this is the neoliberal takeover of education - and very much made in the USA (and some parts of Western Europe). It’s what Pasi Sahlberg calls GERM - the Global education reform movement, which basically sees children as economic entities and schooling as a way to prepare children for the global economy. As Peter and other mention, there is so much research around how children learn best, and it is being routinely ignored in favour of economic agendas. There is of course nuance here and it’s not so black and white, but to an extent this is the result of our capitalist system and our politician’s subservience to it.
On the flip side, my 5-year old can read chapter books and do addition/subtraction/multiplication, he's entering Kindergarten in the fall, and I didn't make him hate anything by teaching him those things. We just did Learn to Read in 100 Easy Lessons together & Singapore Math / Beast Academy. It required no special ability on my part, just following the script and encouraging him to do it. Maybe not all kids can do that, but I think that teaching the kids that can do it is a good thing.
I've also read research that waiting until 6 to start teaching reading can be bad for some reason. I agree that a strict timeline or forcing it every day would have gotten more pushback, though. Maybe learning to read is hard, but it's our job to help kids get through it as soon as they can because the benefits compound, and while the rigidness of a forced curriculum doesn't help, doing things that's hard will always be hard for some kids.
Rob, there are big differences among kids in when they become motivated to read. Kids learn very quickly when they are self-motivated. For homeschoolers, there is no advantage in learning to read early. If you are going to a typical school, however, if you can't ready by age 6 or so you will be shamed, and if you can't read by second or third grade you won't be able to keep up because everything depends on reading. Here is one of my posts on this topic: https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/freedom-learn/201002/children-teach-themselves-read
My 30-year-old daughter was reading by age 4 just because of her own natural curiosity and being read to regularly. She now has a 3 1/2-year-old who not only loves to read on her own but takes great joy in learning the sounds of the letters and decoding them. Maybe it’s a result of personality but this whole education system is ass backwards and why I unschooled my children. Now I’m second generation and it’s working.
My advice keep them out of school until age 7. Let them learn whatever they want and let them play all day.
I'm very skeptical that would work with my children (3 boys), though that may be a boy/girl difference in temperament. If I didn't encourage / reward reading & math, I feel quite confident he wouldn't have done anything at all in that direction.
You do bring up a good point. Somewhere along the line I read research that boys aren’t ready to read until nine or 10 years old and they often get labeled in school as poor readers or reading disability. I have a stepson and four brothers and I have noticed that neither one of them were interested in learning to read until much later. Perhaps we need to take this into consideration in our expectations although good luck talking about gender differences in our current climate🤪😬
Haha. It is absolutely wild to me that people can deny gender differences when they are so huge and so obvious to any parents who interact with both boys and girls. It's not subtle!
Not to say there aren't exceptions, but anecdotally 9 / 10 kids are stereotypical
I do think that boys need more encouragement in general to work. This reminds me of
I was just reflecting the other day with a friend of mine, that in our cohort, we didn't learn to read until the very end of kindergarten or 1st grade, and we didn't learn to add until 1st grade. And we are all more than fine, we all went on to have STEM careers and graduate degrees.
I don't understand the American obsession that doing things earlier and faster leads to better outcomes a decade later. I don't think that follows at all.
Isn't that status quo bias? Either way, I wouldn't expect the effect to be so large that it makes the difference between having a STEM career or not.
If many kids can read earlier, it's easy to teach them by following a prescriptive manual, and it can be done in 15 minutes a day leaving plenty of time for play, I struggle to see the argument against it.
The arguments for learning to read earlier could be any of these:
(a) less school is required because they already learned to read and don't need to spend that time any longer
(b) there is some additional development they could have during the same amount of time in school.
(c) school is just easier for them until everyone else catches up and they can mostly chill / impress their friends
Nothing earth shattering to be sure. I agree that it's unlikely that a study would be able to identify the effects in 10 years. Tyranny of the null hypothesis
No the expectation has shifted to reading before kindergarten.
I don't fully follow the rest of your argument, but the over all trend is more school rather than less; reading earlier doesn't lead to less school later or opportunities to chill or play, but a trend to cram in even more stuff. I think the overall trend of "more is more" is wrong.
Totally agreed on "more is more" being the wrong direction. My ideal schooling would cease compulsory education / common-core type things after the basics - reading/writing/arithmetic. At minimum, I think that people should be able to use high school years how they want. Art, foreign language, history, english lit, etc all optional. Research shows that none of it is retained as grownups. And "one size fits all" is pessimal for experiments and variations that find true optimums.
Being able to read before Kindergarten is an expectation, or "prepare to read"? The elite private preschool in NYC my son attends does not seem to have that expectation, beyond basic "kinder prep". I suppose they learned the alphabet and so on, but I haven't heard of any lessons like you might find in 100 Easy lessons.
In my own (anecdotal) experience as a homeschooling mother, it seems kids in more natural, child-led educational models begin to read at a variety of different ages, but more often than not, by age 12 or so, the early readers are are indistinguishable from children who weren't reading fluently until age 9 of 10. This is assuming a healthy home & generally text-rich one as well, with engaged, interested parents. (I do understand not every child has that, sadly.)
There's a fascinating book out there, "Better Late Than Early" which outlines some of the benefits of and research that supports just dropping the whole "skill X has to be learned by age y or there's no hope!" stuff.
Learn to Read in 100 Easy Lessons can be pretty frustrating. (The Amazon reviews are worth reading, if one has never seen them.) What was their reaction to it? There is also the issue of having the cognitive emotional tools for it. With reading, for instance, we need a reasonably large phonological working memory in place. While there's no strict biological age at which this emerges, there are 5 year olds who don't have it. Forcing them to do it can be counter-productive and set up bad long term attitudes towards learning. That's not to say there are 5-year-olds who can. Surely there are, but allowing them to discover challenges and learn that to take them on is fruitful seems like a better strategy that does not involving shielding them from hard things.
I mostly followed them exactly and found it completely fine, with a caveat. I did not strictly require every single activity, since keeping it moving and not turning it into a fight was the primary objective.
As a result, I let them speed through letter reviews (making each sound very quickly), didn't nag them more than a bit about blending letters (he was terrible at blending, but still understood the words), skipped some of the rhyming exercises when I deemed it unnecessary, and I did not always make them repeat lists of words in "sound it out" vs "read quickly" modes. I also allowed him to do half the lesson at a time and pick up the next day. The only thing I strictly required is reading the story 2-3 times at the end of each lesson and the writing practice.
In total it took about a year to get through the book since we didn't do it every day and took an extended break in the middle around lesson 50. However, he has good retention and I didn't observe backsliding / forgetting at all.
My impression was that the 3 things that really made a difference:
1. Learning the sounds each letter makes and seeing the difference between long and short sounds
2. Sounding out then saying it fast (sounding out in his head)
3. Repeating each story -- I could see how much more easily he could read the story the 2nd or 3rd time through.
Overall, I think that repetition is key, and spreading it over a long time period can reduce the feeling of boredom that repetition naturally brings.
My 4-year-old is on Lesson 40, but I have less time to encourage him, so I think he could actually be further along. We go many weeks without picking it up at all. This is an example where I have the thought that he spends 6+ hours in a classroom 5 days a week with people I pay much $$$, and wouldn't it be nice if he could get one of those lessons in 15 minutes a day instead of being subject to my availability. I guess I'm the bad guy around these parts, but from my POV he spends 10 hours a day playing (which is typical in preschool?), and 15 minutes reading is hardly child abuse. I can imagine that the time allotments in primary school change considerably, but just imagine how much easier it will be for kids who already know how to read!
My 2.5-year-old can not yet learn the letters or connect them to the sounds. He just plays.
This is difficult to read. I want to scoop up these little kids and give them LEGO and sandboxes and sticks and dirt and hours of books read out-loud and heal their little creative minds and hearts.
Yikes! I remember when Common Core was rolling out a few years behind me. I thought about how my learning was a result of my unique relationship with my teachers and their respect and responsiveness to my learning interests and needs. I remember thinking Common Core was a bad idea and this article just articulates the reasons I thought so. It is about respect, which some of the teachers articulate. The teachers aren't being respected in their ability to show up and teach a unique group of students each year and it sounds like the curriculum is taking precedence over teachers respect for their students. Students are so unique that no rigid curriculum will meet all student's needs. I always thought that teaching was an art of using discretion to meet unique needs. That it was an art of equity. Tests are the worst part of school, they are not for the learner. It is ironic, that the tests are a source of harm, since they have immense power to push us and show us how bright we are. It seems that everything about this situation would be different if people were allowed to act upon their intuition and choose respect over disrespect. I am left with the question: How might our education system be changed at all levels if our priority was respect? I expect that our education system would look completely different and that we would see a new level of learning and well-being across all ages.
When people critique homeschooling, it's as if they ignore information like this and say everything is fine while the building is on fire. I went to daycare/public K-12 in rural America from mid 90s to 2013. I was preparing to do the same with my children and seek a career. Until my husband, then-boyfriend said if I wanted I could stay home and homeschool. The homeschoolers I had met throughout my teen years seemed much more independent and unique with little ideas of conformity than my fellow public school peers. Then, I started to research. I was amazed. Inside American Education by Thomas Sowell is a great place to start on what happened and how we got here. It didn't use to be THIS bad.
There is a UK version of this tragedy too - seeking sources for alternative visions, I came across this from the seventeenth century (!) educational reformer Samuel Hartlib - 'A great fault in teaching [is] that children are not made to learne themselves but are always taught' (Hartlib 1639). Well even if I'm not the greatest fan of 'made to learn' in that sentence, I like his idea that learning is something kids do for themselves ... and it seems to me he's still ahead of the game, or the lack of games, all this time later! The best of History is on your side - best wishes George
Common core and standardized testing are doing exactly what they were designed to do: strangle intellectual curiosity, stifle creativity, prevent the development of critical thinking and independence, and destroy the sanity and emotional integrity of children as early as possible. It is a feature, not a bug. The current hyper capitalist, imperialist system we live under cannot allow our public education system to produce confident, free thinking individuals who would grow up and threaten that system.
Education has become, just like many necessary human endeavors, subservient to the central oligopoly. I really think there is an underlying ethos in our society which is suspicious of thought, observation and curiosity. Obedience, not self-actualization is the pinnacle of Maslow’s pyramid. I think this is partially downstream of increasing population densities, but also definitely a result of the ways in which communicate with one another. No more administrators! K-12 and College. Administration is an big word for grift.
No improvement where i am across the world in south East Asia. In fact just today i received an email from a parent that wishes to enroll in our child led school. when i inquired why given that the age of the child was above our enrollment for next year ( turning 6 in Nov- we are 3-6) the parent claimed the school where the child currently was could not have the child as the child cannot cope with their curriculum. It's mind blowing !!
The highlight of my K-12 education was my Montessori kindergarten and 1st grade years in 1964/65. I remember learning constantly and having fun. Then it was on to a regular classroom. The learning crawled to a snail's pace and there wasn't much fun, but at least the cafeteria food was still food at that time, we still had recess and children didn't bring chaos from home. After retiring from a navy career, I subbed for 2 years. Things have changed.
As you know, Peter, I’m dismayed about all this. I want to add here my sense that this issue of pressuring kids to “achieve” has expanded during the post pandemic era. I see older students (middle to high schoolers) in my clinical psychology practice (and my own children and their friends) who are pushed to “make up” lost learning and power through academic and extracurricular demands, with no regard for the social losses and emotional traumas they experienced during the pandemic. After a year and a half of my adolescent daughter socializing only remotely, and then an additional year before her friends were willing to consistently socialize in person (it was as if they all felt too uncomfortable to actually be together), she finally fell into a rich social life with her peers, which brings her great joy! That should be as much a priority as her ability to solve algebraic equations!
I’ve seen this firsthand with my older child. She thrived in (private) preschool, which was play-based and had very caring teachers. She got to full-day kindergarten (in the same school!) and it was like she hit a wall. The children were expected to sit at tables for hours a day filling out worksheets. If they finished everything early, then they got to play. She was just starting to read, knew her letters but not enough phonics to break down all but the simplest of words, which I viewed as normal for a child who had just turned 5; apparently not! No, she was being asked to read and write at what seemed to me to be a first grade level. We were told to drill our child with sight words, which made us all miserable, so we relaxed and only did a little, because the idea of a 5 year old memorizing flash cards after a full day of academics was so obviously wrong to us! None of it was developmentally appropriate. She hated it, and began to show more and more anxiety and despair. In retrospect, I should have pulled her from kindergarten. I didn’t realize just how bad it was. School shut down in March 2020 due to Covid.
First grade (public) was fully remote in fall and winter; she was expected to be online 5 hours a day, reading independently. My husband and I did our best to help her with class while working remotely ourselves. Reading and writing were a huge challenge. Her reading skills were still below what the school wanted, but she was also one of the younger kids in her class, and I had done a bunch of reading about how children learn. It was obvious to me that she was simply not on the required “schedule” for learning to read, but that actually, the schedule ignored the normal ages for children to develop the necessary neurological development.
Around February they were able to go back to school in person, and around the same time, something “clicked” in her brain and she was suddenly reading much more fluently than she had been. This made a big difference in the speed she could write, as well, which helped with many other assignments.
She’s now finishing 4th grade and tests as reading at a 11th or 12th grade level, so apparently we were right that she just needed to get a bit older before her brain would be ready to read! She’s in advanced math and reading, and gets good grades. However, she struggles badly with anxiety and emotional issues, particularly around not finishing her work quickly enough. She gets overwhelmed easily. She has many friends, but doesn’t know how to deal with it when her friends don’t agree with each other. We really push play and socializing after school and have her in therapy. I’m so frustrated that between these inappropriate demands of the curriculum and Covid, she and her classmates have really missed out on the social/emotional development time that they need.
I’ve also got a younger child who will be starting kindergarten next year. We’ve got him signed up for half day kindergarten through our public school (our public district is still doing half day k, which isn’t the norm around here) and half day aftercare at the park district (because we need the childcare). I’m hoping that combination will be less developmentally inappropriate than the full day k we had our daughter in. I don’t think he’s going to be an early reader either, and I’m determined to do my best to keep him from feeling like a failure at 5. But I know from friends and neighbors that the curriculum isn’t that different. They’re demanding too much, as though just because some kids can read fluently at 5, all kids should be able to.
I'm seeing the results of this now at the high school level. Class discussion need to be forced, students won't voluntarily answer questions. Social media is their lifeline. Fewer and fewer students display any joy about being in school. More and more mental health and emotional insecurity issues. So much development is lost because of the move away from unstructured playtime during the school day in the early years. Ask any kid what their favorite part of the school day is - recess.
Such an important topic, thank you for addressing it! For those interested in the history of kindergarten, which is fascinating, here is a glimpse of it:
“Kindergarten was implemented by popular acclaim nationwide to give children a few short hours a day of valuable socialization and expose them to nature while stimulating their imagination, developing their moral sense, and hopefully burning off a little excess energy.”
More on the first kindergarten here:
https://thefederalist.com/2022/05/19/are-schools-contributing-to-skyrocketing-adhd-diagnoses-im-a-pediatrician-and-i-think-so/
The current standard for kindergarten programs involves about 10 minutes of outdoor play a day (if the weather is good and the children are behaving well) and the use of computers for learning. The gap between what we know children need and how we are operating is astounding! When will we ever learn? The future of humanity is at stake. Is anyone listening?
Reading all this I'm curious if there are teachers taking a harder stand than quitting. As in ignoring the rules and teaching instead what they, and a lot of us, understand is best for the children, or are the potential repercussions to great?
This is horrifying! It's been 40 years since I've been in school but I have no idea did it come to this. Who the hell's idea was is this? Why does anyone think that any of this is a good idea? Do they not have any kids of their own? If I were conspiratorially minded I would think that this was a plot destroy the well-being of America's children.
Did they copy this model from some other culture? Does it actually work to produce well rounded children in that culture?
The model looks to me like he was taken from a Chinese labor camp (or as they call them "Reeducation") which if I'm not mistaken are designed to destroy independent thought and well-being. And it has such a benign sounding name: "common core".
The way I see it (as well as many ECE researchers) this is the neoliberal takeover of education - and very much made in the USA (and some parts of Western Europe). It’s what Pasi Sahlberg calls GERM - the Global education reform movement, which basically sees children as economic entities and schooling as a way to prepare children for the global economy. As Peter and other mention, there is so much research around how children learn best, and it is being routinely ignored in favour of economic agendas. There is of course nuance here and it’s not so black and white, but to an extent this is the result of our capitalist system and our politician’s subservience to it.
On the flip side, my 5-year old can read chapter books and do addition/subtraction/multiplication, he's entering Kindergarten in the fall, and I didn't make him hate anything by teaching him those things. We just did Learn to Read in 100 Easy Lessons together & Singapore Math / Beast Academy. It required no special ability on my part, just following the script and encouraging him to do it. Maybe not all kids can do that, but I think that teaching the kids that can do it is a good thing.
I've also read research that waiting until 6 to start teaching reading can be bad for some reason. I agree that a strict timeline or forcing it every day would have gotten more pushback, though. Maybe learning to read is hard, but it's our job to help kids get through it as soon as they can because the benefits compound, and while the rigidness of a forced curriculum doesn't help, doing things that's hard will always be hard for some kids.
Rob, there are big differences among kids in when they become motivated to read. Kids learn very quickly when they are self-motivated. For homeschoolers, there is no advantage in learning to read early. If you are going to a typical school, however, if you can't ready by age 6 or so you will be shamed, and if you can't read by second or third grade you won't be able to keep up because everything depends on reading. Here is one of my posts on this topic: https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/freedom-learn/201002/children-teach-themselves-read
My 30-year-old daughter was reading by age 4 just because of her own natural curiosity and being read to regularly. She now has a 3 1/2-year-old who not only loves to read on her own but takes great joy in learning the sounds of the letters and decoding them. Maybe it’s a result of personality but this whole education system is ass backwards and why I unschooled my children. Now I’m second generation and it’s working.
My advice keep them out of school until age 7. Let them learn whatever they want and let them play all day.
That sounds wonderful.
I'm very skeptical that would work with my children (3 boys), though that may be a boy/girl difference in temperament. If I didn't encourage / reward reading & math, I feel quite confident he wouldn't have done anything at all in that direction.
You do bring up a good point. Somewhere along the line I read research that boys aren’t ready to read until nine or 10 years old and they often get labeled in school as poor readers or reading disability. I have a stepson and four brothers and I have noticed that neither one of them were interested in learning to read until much later. Perhaps we need to take this into consideration in our expectations although good luck talking about gender differences in our current climate🤪😬
Haha. It is absolutely wild to me that people can deny gender differences when they are so huge and so obvious to any parents who interact with both boys and girls. It's not subtle!
Not to say there aren't exceptions, but anecdotally 9 / 10 kids are stereotypical
I do think that boys need more encouragement in general to work. This reminds me of
https://www.robkhenderson.com/p/no-one-expects-young-men-to-do-anything
I was just reflecting the other day with a friend of mine, that in our cohort, we didn't learn to read until the very end of kindergarten or 1st grade, and we didn't learn to add until 1st grade. And we are all more than fine, we all went on to have STEM careers and graduate degrees.
I don't understand the American obsession that doing things earlier and faster leads to better outcomes a decade later. I don't think that follows at all.
Isn't that status quo bias? Either way, I wouldn't expect the effect to be so large that it makes the difference between having a STEM career or not.
If many kids can read earlier, it's easy to teach them by following a prescriptive manual, and it can be done in 15 minutes a day leaving plenty of time for play, I struggle to see the argument against it.
The arguments for learning to read earlier could be any of these:
(a) less school is required because they already learned to read and don't need to spend that time any longer
(b) there is some additional development they could have during the same amount of time in school.
(c) school is just easier for them until everyone else catches up and they can mostly chill / impress their friends
Nothing earth shattering to be sure. I agree that it's unlikely that a study would be able to identify the effects in 10 years. Tyranny of the null hypothesis
https://arnoldkling.substack.com/p/the-null-hypothesis-strikes-again
No the expectation has shifted to reading before kindergarten.
I don't fully follow the rest of your argument, but the over all trend is more school rather than less; reading earlier doesn't lead to less school later or opportunities to chill or play, but a trend to cram in even more stuff. I think the overall trend of "more is more" is wrong.
Totally agreed on "more is more" being the wrong direction. My ideal schooling would cease compulsory education / common-core type things after the basics - reading/writing/arithmetic. At minimum, I think that people should be able to use high school years how they want. Art, foreign language, history, english lit, etc all optional. Research shows that none of it is retained as grownups. And "one size fits all" is pessimal for experiments and variations that find true optimums.
Being able to read before Kindergarten is an expectation, or "prepare to read"? The elite private preschool in NYC my son attends does not seem to have that expectation, beyond basic "kinder prep". I suppose they learned the alphabet and so on, but I haven't heard of any lessons like you might find in 100 Easy lessons.
In my own (anecdotal) experience as a homeschooling mother, it seems kids in more natural, child-led educational models begin to read at a variety of different ages, but more often than not, by age 12 or so, the early readers are are indistinguishable from children who weren't reading fluently until age 9 of 10. This is assuming a healthy home & generally text-rich one as well, with engaged, interested parents. (I do understand not every child has that, sadly.)
There's a fascinating book out there, "Better Late Than Early" which outlines some of the benefits of and research that supports just dropping the whole "skill X has to be learned by age y or there's no hope!" stuff.
Learn to Read in 100 Easy Lessons can be pretty frustrating. (The Amazon reviews are worth reading, if one has never seen them.) What was their reaction to it? There is also the issue of having the cognitive emotional tools for it. With reading, for instance, we need a reasonably large phonological working memory in place. While there's no strict biological age at which this emerges, there are 5 year olds who don't have it. Forcing them to do it can be counter-productive and set up bad long term attitudes towards learning. That's not to say there are 5-year-olds who can. Surely there are, but allowing them to discover challenges and learn that to take them on is fruitful seems like a better strategy that does not involving shielding them from hard things.
I mostly followed them exactly and found it completely fine, with a caveat. I did not strictly require every single activity, since keeping it moving and not turning it into a fight was the primary objective.
As a result, I let them speed through letter reviews (making each sound very quickly), didn't nag them more than a bit about blending letters (he was terrible at blending, but still understood the words), skipped some of the rhyming exercises when I deemed it unnecessary, and I did not always make them repeat lists of words in "sound it out" vs "read quickly" modes. I also allowed him to do half the lesson at a time and pick up the next day. The only thing I strictly required is reading the story 2-3 times at the end of each lesson and the writing practice.
In total it took about a year to get through the book since we didn't do it every day and took an extended break in the middle around lesson 50. However, he has good retention and I didn't observe backsliding / forgetting at all.
My impression was that the 3 things that really made a difference:
1. Learning the sounds each letter makes and seeing the difference between long and short sounds
2. Sounding out then saying it fast (sounding out in his head)
3. Repeating each story -- I could see how much more easily he could read the story the 2nd or 3rd time through.
Overall, I think that repetition is key, and spreading it over a long time period can reduce the feeling of boredom that repetition naturally brings.
My 4-year-old is on Lesson 40, but I have less time to encourage him, so I think he could actually be further along. We go many weeks without picking it up at all. This is an example where I have the thought that he spends 6+ hours in a classroom 5 days a week with people I pay much $$$, and wouldn't it be nice if he could get one of those lessons in 15 minutes a day instead of being subject to my availability. I guess I'm the bad guy around these parts, but from my POV he spends 10 hours a day playing (which is typical in preschool?), and 15 minutes reading is hardly child abuse. I can imagine that the time allotments in primary school change considerably, but just imagine how much easier it will be for kids who already know how to read!
My 2.5-year-old can not yet learn the letters or connect them to the sounds. He just plays.
Thanks for the detailed answer!
This is difficult to read. I want to scoop up these little kids and give them LEGO and sandboxes and sticks and dirt and hours of books read out-loud and heal their little creative minds and hearts.
Yikes! I remember when Common Core was rolling out a few years behind me. I thought about how my learning was a result of my unique relationship with my teachers and their respect and responsiveness to my learning interests and needs. I remember thinking Common Core was a bad idea and this article just articulates the reasons I thought so. It is about respect, which some of the teachers articulate. The teachers aren't being respected in their ability to show up and teach a unique group of students each year and it sounds like the curriculum is taking precedence over teachers respect for their students. Students are so unique that no rigid curriculum will meet all student's needs. I always thought that teaching was an art of using discretion to meet unique needs. That it was an art of equity. Tests are the worst part of school, they are not for the learner. It is ironic, that the tests are a source of harm, since they have immense power to push us and show us how bright we are. It seems that everything about this situation would be different if people were allowed to act upon their intuition and choose respect over disrespect. I am left with the question: How might our education system be changed at all levels if our priority was respect? I expect that our education system would look completely different and that we would see a new level of learning and well-being across all ages.
When people critique homeschooling, it's as if they ignore information like this and say everything is fine while the building is on fire. I went to daycare/public K-12 in rural America from mid 90s to 2013. I was preparing to do the same with my children and seek a career. Until my husband, then-boyfriend said if I wanted I could stay home and homeschool. The homeschoolers I had met throughout my teen years seemed much more independent and unique with little ideas of conformity than my fellow public school peers. Then, I started to research. I was amazed. Inside American Education by Thomas Sowell is a great place to start on what happened and how we got here. It didn't use to be THIS bad.
Hi Peter
There is a UK version of this tragedy too - seeking sources for alternative visions, I came across this from the seventeenth century (!) educational reformer Samuel Hartlib - 'A great fault in teaching [is] that children are not made to learne themselves but are always taught' (Hartlib 1639). Well even if I'm not the greatest fan of 'made to learn' in that sentence, I like his idea that learning is something kids do for themselves ... and it seems to me he's still ahead of the game, or the lack of games, all this time later! The best of History is on your side - best wishes George
Common core and standardized testing are doing exactly what they were designed to do: strangle intellectual curiosity, stifle creativity, prevent the development of critical thinking and independence, and destroy the sanity and emotional integrity of children as early as possible. It is a feature, not a bug. The current hyper capitalist, imperialist system we live under cannot allow our public education system to produce confident, free thinking individuals who would grow up and threaten that system.
Education has become, just like many necessary human endeavors, subservient to the central oligopoly. I really think there is an underlying ethos in our society which is suspicious of thought, observation and curiosity. Obedience, not self-actualization is the pinnacle of Maslow’s pyramid. I think this is partially downstream of increasing population densities, but also definitely a result of the ways in which communicate with one another. No more administrators! K-12 and College. Administration is an big word for grift.
Soooo sad!
No improvement where i am across the world in south East Asia. In fact just today i received an email from a parent that wishes to enroll in our child led school. when i inquired why given that the age of the child was above our enrollment for next year ( turning 6 in Nov- we are 3-6) the parent claimed the school where the child currently was could not have the child as the child cannot cope with their curriculum. It's mind blowing !!