My strong opinion is that educationally, THE most important thing you must do with your child is TALK to them. From the beginning. From year 0. Discuss things with them. Let them soak as much understandable speech as they can between years 0 and 2. This will have a far more profound effect in their life rather than did they learn to read at 4 or 8 years of age.
Could you specify what is horrifying about the previous post? Why would it be more important for a 5 year old to learn to read rather than, say, spend their time building Legos, practice crafts or climbing into trees? Like another poster stated, most kids in Finland do not start to formally learn to read until they are 6 (preschool, if the parents want so) and at the latest when they enter primary school (7). I would claim Finland has a pretty good public primary education system.
Pushing kids to do too much too soon has no advantages, imho. There are skills that are best started acquiring at a youngish age but you will have to convince me pretty hard that reading is one of them. Kids have this natural curiosity to an amazing variety of things. But what those things are can be quite random. The best way to have them learn something is to apply this natural curiosity - i.e. find what they are interested in - and the support them in this activity. This does not mean allowing them play videogames or watch cartoons whole the whole day.
I would say if the kids like it and want to then sure, teach them to read. But before 7, I would claim it is more valuable to find those things that they are really keen into and let them practice those. This creates a positive association to knowledge acquisition (the love of learning). And at that age they soak information and skills like sponges if they are motivated and have the mental capacity to grasp the concepts.
> Why would it be more important for a 5 year old to learn to read rather than, say, spend their time building Legos, practice crafts or climbing into trees?
The hypothesis that I think should be tested is whether there is correlation between being a child prodigy in a technical field (in math, physics, computer science or engineering) and getting to read early.
It makes sense theoretically -- if you learn to read by age 8, is there enough time for you to grasp all of high school math and computer science by age 14, like Manjul Bhargava?
While I can imagine my hypothesis being true, that doesn't make it into an argument against later reading age. It just means that for a group of kids this might not the best decision. (And since most of us think of themselves as the "smart kids", maybe that's why a lot of us here are opposed to it.)
> The hypothesis that I think should be tested is whether there is correlation between being a child prodigy in a technical field ... and getting to read early.
It would be cool if all children could be helped to find the thing they are good at and love and let them become the best they can in that field through positive reinforcement and minimum coercion.
> It makes sense theoretically -- if you learn to read by age 8, is there enough time for you to grasp all of high school math and computer science by age 14, like Manjul Bhargava?
I think the most important thing what you can extract from the case of the Field's medalist is that he seems to enjoy what he does.
Usually when lots of parents are really ambituous about their childrens futures they force their children to rote-learn lots of mundane knowledge or repeat tiring exercises... such an approach leads most of the time to lots of sad adults with average achievements. I would much prefer lots of content and happy adults with average achievements.
The prodigies will happen, but it would be really nasty to force all children to try to be prodigies.
Could you specify what is horrifying about the previous post? Why would it be more important for a 5 year old to learn to read rather than, say, spend their time building Legos, practice crafts or climbing into trees? Like another poster stated, most kids in Finland do not start to formally learn to read until they are 6 (preschool, if the parents want so) and at the latest when they enter primary school (7). I would claim Finland has a pretty good public primary education system.
Pushing kids to do too much too soon has no advantages, imho. There are skills that are best started acquiring at a youngish age but you will have to convince me pretty hard that reading is one of them. Kids have this natural curiosity to an amazing variety of things. But what those things are can be quite random. The best way to have them learn something is to apply this natural curiosity - i.e. find what they are interested in - and the support them in this activity. This does not mean allowing them play videogames or watch cartoons whole the whole day.
I would say if the kids like it and want to then sure, teach them to read. But before 7, I would claim it is more valuable to find those things that they are really keen into and let them practice those. This creates a positive association to knowledge acquisition (the love of learning). And at that age they soak information and skills like sponges if they are motivated and have the mental capacity to grasp the concepts.