I read this article just as I started making Powerpoint presentations for my boy. It’s interesting, but it’s also a little annoying and misleading. The stereotype of the pushy parent is admitted to be a stereotype (that’s good), but only by admitting a single exception (that’s not so good). David Elkind is presented as a neutral expert who is a “voice in the wilderness”–the implication being that his views are correct. Kathy Hirsh-Pasek and other experts critical of early learning are, again, merely quoted approvingly. In short, the article begins from an assumption that early academic education of the Doman stripe is semi-sophisticated bourgeois nonsense, then hunts for evidence to support it.
I’ve actually written some leading experts on all these issues, looking for hard research and asking them to elaborate arguments against, for example, teaching reading at a very early age. I came away very disappointed – they really weren’t able to articulate their objections in any way that I could not easily dismiss as a failure to understand the educational programs or the kinds of people who follow them.
I also find the lumping of Baby Einstein with the sort of stuff we talk about in these forums to be a little annoying, too. There is a lot of shoddy analysis like that in the article–especially where studies that really prove little are presented as if they presented profound findings.
Just for example, one study says it’s great how kids who rated as superior in intelligence had cortexes that matured as late as 11-12–so, the suggestion goes, it’s good to be a late bloomer. But that, of course, doesn’t follow at all. All that follows is that it might not be bad to be a late bloomer. And what, pray tell, does this have to do with the advisability of starting early? Nothing, as far as I can see. Does it make the brain less “plastic” to have a lot of information in it at an early age? That seems to be the article’s implication. Maybe – but where’s the data or argument on that?
Oh, and here’s another piece of “brilliant” analysis: “There’s probably a reason, Giedd says, that researchers have found that very few Nobel laureates were child prodigies. They were more typically solid students, and many were late bloomers academically.” Big deal. This is a scientist trained in probability? Well, then why doesn’t he reason that, of course, there are a lot more mediocre and solid students, period, than really brilliant ones, and brilliance in school isn’t directly correlated with being Nobel material? So there’s bound to be more Nobel laureates who weren’t stellar students simply because there are so many more non-stellar students (like me, for instance!). Yes, that’s a lot more reasonable, and does not require that one accept the absolutely absurd notion that being a good student somehow puts one at a disadvantage when it comes to later success in intellectual life!
In my own reading and discussion, I’ve come to the conclusion–well, the suspicion–that a lot of the resistance to early academic learning, from the professoriate and educationists, really comes down to a knee-jerk emotional reaction of educated egalitarians against what they perceive as overreaching, competitive, bourgeois types. Well, maybe there are some people like that among us, but I don’t know. I get the sense that most of us simply want what’s best for our children. I don’t see much evidence of competitiveness here. People generally brag about their kids only after I specifically ask them to. lol Anyway, this article is not exactly what I would call a brilliant analysis.
One last comment: how Einstein got to be Einstein proves absolutely nothing for anybody’s case. OK?