This is an important question, one I’ve thought some about myself. Critics of very early education simply assume that parents are merely competitive. But I think this needs to be put into perspective. I hope this won’t be too boring (poetry, it ain’t), but this is how I think through these sorts of issues, rambling and self-critical…and this is as much for myself as for anyone reading this. I like to think these things through for my own benefit!
cybermommy, you ask, to begin with, “do you ever wonder if all this emphasis on early learning achievement is more for our own satisfaction and pride than to promote the future happiness of our children?” Well, presumably, if we do believe we’re promoting the future happiness of our children (by giving them a lot of knowledge at an early age), then we will quite naturally derive satisfaction and pride from that. There would probably be something wrong with you if you didn’t. We seek satisfaction in everything, in life, including raising our children, and proper pride is not a bad thing, but a perfectly healthy thing.
But that is perhaps too glib. Your question is very interestingly formulated, just the right way for us to think philosophically about this stuff. The suggestion is that we are more motivated, somehow, by seeking our own satisfaction and pride than by promoting the interests of our children, whenever the two might come into conflict. In other words, perhaps we place our own pride in their achievements above their own actual interest; if so, no doubt the problem is that we ignore or do not investigate their own interest, because we get such personal satisfaction in their “academic progress,” and really, that is all we care about.
Now, placing your own satisfaction above the child’s interest doesn’t have to mean you’re motivated by vicarious competitiveness. One might be unhealthily obsessive about a child’s academic progress not because it will help the child beat out other children, not because it will make you think you’re the best parent, but because (for whatever reason) you place an unreasonable or unhealthy value on “academic progress.”
The reason I’m splitting hairs here is kind of personal. I used to be very competitive. Now, I’m not so much. Mind you, I don’t think there’s the slightest thing wrong with being competitive, as long as it’s healthy–but, since we’re dealing with young lives and minds, we should worry very much about whether our competitiveness is “healthy.” Ultimately, if we rationalize, if we make excuses, then we might ignore or fail to see our children’s best interest, and they can suffer as a result.
I’m no saint, but I don’t think I have that problem, competitiveness–at least, I hope I don’t, maybe I’m just rationalizing. 
But, and here is why I was splitting hairs above, I worry that I might be inclined to ignore my child’s best interest, again not because I’m competitive, but because I place too much value on knowledge and the life of the mind. If my boy turned out to have low earning potential but be deeply knowledgeable and curious, I’d be much happier than if he were a “material success” but no interest in learning and no concern for ideas. But that’s because those are my own values. And we can sometimes take our values to an extreme, which means that we place them over other legitimate interests.
Mainly what I worry about is pushing too hard–insisting, or “suggesting” too much, in a way that makes my boy unhappy or turns him off to learning. More about this further down.
But, cybermommy, it seems like your worry is that, after we put aside all our rationalizations, the only reason we might have for wanting to do very early education is to make ourselves feel good, and that the child isn’t really benefitted. But this seems simply wrong. There is a fair bit of persuasive evidence, even if there aren’t as many scientific studies as we would hope for, that children really do benefit from very early education. If you think that’s just a rationalization, then you ought to explain why you think so. Saying simply, “we compete vicariously through our children” does not prove the point in the slightest way. Besides, a little bit of vicarious competition, as long as it doesn’t blind us to our children’s true interests, isn’t an obviously bad thing. What’s wrong with it?
But against me personally, I guess the more interesting attack would go like this: “Hey DadDude, you just want to see the trappings of academic success. You want to see your son learn to read at an early age, you want to see him use big words, you just want immediate evidence of progress, to convince yourself that his mind is developing very well. But in this you are really just obsessive about the value of knowledge, so that you ignore his other interests. Maybe he isn’t as happy-go-lucky as he could be. Maybe he’ll be socially stunted, somehow–a geek. And maybe, in your desire to see immediate results in terms of his mental development, you’re ignoring his long term academic interests. He’d be more creative, more passionate about knowledge, and he’d be better able to reason things through later, if you were to teach him things when ‘age appropriate.’” People say things like this.
The topic question is, “Do you get worried that it’s not really for the kids?” Well, in short, for me, the way I worry the most in which it might not be “for the kid” is that my desire for instant academic results might have somehow blinded me to his long-term interests, including intellectual interests.
But I’m still doing it as much as ever, which means my worries haven’t stopped me. Why not? Because I don’t get the appeal of the arguments on the other side. He seems no less happy-go-lucky than any other little kid–probably more so. Socially stunted…well, I don’t worry about that really at all. I don’t think having knowledge or being “a geek” is a bad thing, because I’m proudly geeky myself, and most of my friends are geeks too. The item I’ve most worried about is this one: “He’d be more creative, more passionate about knowledge, and he’d be better able to reason things through later, if you were to teach him things when ‘age appropriate.’” Well, I’d like take those each up in turn.
The notion that a person is more creative if he plays more as a young child, and doesn’t learn so much, seems to me not grounded in studies (I don’t know of any studies that establish any such thing) so much as a philosophically romantic attitude toward childhood. The attitude began with Rousseau’s Emile, I guess. Well, I’ve read Emile and let’s just say I wasn’t convinced. Besides, the minds of the most brilliant artists and the most creative scholars are filled with facts. (Mind you, I think play is excellent for all sorts of reasons and our boy spends most of his waking hours outside of meals playing.)
But, one scientific argument (as I understand it) goes, the mind is more “plastic” at an early age, and if you start “hard wiring” a lot of knowledge at an early age, you reduce its “plasticity,” which is not much different from creativity. You get a child that is able to recite many facts but who cannot hypothesize creatively or create interesting art. Well, I’m not a brain expert by any means, and maybe I have something to learn here, but from everything I’ve read, this is all very speculative at best. In lieu of harder science that does not look like metaphor and biased speculation, I prefer commonsense considerations. Some great artists, like Mozart, began “hard wiring” their artistry from an early age, and this made them better artists, not worse. I’ve seen art online from home schoolers who began their “academic” learning well before age six, and it’s remarkably good. And then there are the many anecdotes of people who began with Doman and are now in professions that demand constant intellectual creativity, such as computer programming.
OK, but what about the desire for knowledge getting dampened by too much early learning? “Early ripe, early rot,” I saw somewhere online recently. When children get to school after learning the K-3 curriculum before age 6, they get to school and have lost their desire to learn. Well, if so, that’s probably because they’re incredibly bored and are used to being challenged and being listened to.
In my own experience with my boy, I not infrequently see that he’s getting bored–but then I almost always immediately stop whatever I’m doing and switch to something that is not boring. The sad fact for “Doman moms” is that there isn’t always the best material ready to hand to satisfy our children’s insatiable curiosity. For example, earlier this morning my boy demanded to play with one of those U.S.-European converter plugs, so I explained to him as best as I could about it. He was in rapt attention. I think people don’t realize that a kid doesn’t look on this sort of thing just as another weird-looking play thing, they really want to know what it is and something about how it works. Then I asked him if he wanted to learn more about electricity, and he said “yes.” Well, I haven’t made any new electricity presentations, or tried to find new electricity-related books, or done any electricity experiments (lemon battery!)…but it turns out he’s still interested. He doesn’t like to look at Electricity 1-3 anymore because, I think, he already knows what they have to teach.
The bottom line is precisely the reverse of what our critics imply: kids who get taught a lot early, like our kids, greatly increase their desire to learn, and if they’re bored, it’s not because their curiosity is any less, but because they want to learn something new. If you put a really curious early learner in a regular school, I think they’re a good chance the kid’s going to be really bored. That’s not a sign the kid’s curiosity has been drained out of him by soul-killing learning, but that he now has a very special, highly-developed curiosity, and the regular school curriculum just doesn’t satisfy it.
Finally, there is the old canard of educationists, who say that teaching a lot of facts (at any age!) is unnecessary, and that what is really necessary is that we focus on teaching reasoning or critical thinking, and direct experience. The criticism of Doman-style very early learning is that teaching a lot of facts is not actually in the child’s academic interest because this puts the recitation of meaningless, out-of-context facts in the place of careful, creative reasoning.
This is just complete nonsense. The suggestion is often made that people in Japan, China, Korea, and Brazil (no doubt other places) just memorize a lot of stuff and therefore never learn to think critically. Ignoring the dubious conclusion, I have to say: what an obvious non sequitur! The fact is that we deeply need data to reason about, and the main way that we learn how to reason and think critically is not through abstract lessons in logic or by “problem solving” exercises, but by carefully thinking about various facts we have at our disposal, and how they are interrelated.
OK, I’ve been rambling on for a long time here and probably anyone who’s still reading is wondering what the point of this is. The point is that, as far as I’ve been able to ascertain, there is little in the way of persuasive data or argument that indicates that very early education, a la Doman and others, tends to harm the academic/intellectual development of children. In fact, the evidence seems to point to great benefits in this regard. Maybe this is overstating the case, though. All I really want to say is that it is rational, not irrational, to do what we’re doing–as far as I can tell so far.
This means that as long as we aren’t rationalizing really harmful behavior, and we don’t have an unhealthy interest in our children’s education, then it’s not a terrible thing if we take some proper personal pride in the results and derive a little satisfaction from the positive comparison with other children.
Let me finish up by listing off some of my real, practical worries:
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That I will insist on showing a presentation, book, or some other media when my boy doesn’t want to see it–and that, as a result, he does get turned off to it or even to the whole subject it’s about. I’m sure that can happen, but so far it has happened only very rarely with us, I think. If he doesn’t like what I spent an hour making, too bad for me…I’ll try again in a month or three.
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That I will lose my enthusiasm for teaching, and so not take the time to make/gather new materials, and set a bad example for my boy in terms of interest.
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That I will “test” my child too much and make him too self-conscious. This can kill his motivation, as Doman warned.
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That I will praise my boy too much. Beyond a certain point, praise is unnecessary, it doesn’t increase healthy self-esteem–it just makes the kid into a vain and spoiled little know-it-all. To keep a person’s curiosity alive, it is necessary that he have some humility and ability to see that he does not already know everything worth knowing!
Sorry for the length…obviously, I care about the topic. lol
