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Comment by vlunkr | Hacker News Reader

This is a really disturbing trend to me. If you learn to read one year earlier then the last generation then.. what? What long term effect will that have on your life? Kids are learning so much at that young age already, even if they aren't sitting a desk learning from a certified teacher. It's cliche, but we need to let kids be kids for a while.

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My daughter learned to "read" at 18 months. This was done by putting cards with words next to the things they described all around the house (a card written with "BUCKET" was put next to an actual bucket) for weeks, pointing them out and explaining them through the days. Then occasionally collecting them up and spreading them out on the floor to play a game "Emi, go bring me the bucket card". After six months she was reading billboards along the highway.

The key idea though was that it was always just a game, never a chore. We'd put the cards back BEFORE she got bored of them.

She could read a 400+ page novel in a day at age 11. I can't even come close to that.

This sounds like an interesting approach. What age did you start doing this?

it's an interesting approach if you like picking up bits of torn up and chewed up cards all day long. as for a reading 18 month old child, i call bullshit.

Notice the quotes. I said "read" not read. She was recognizing words on billboards by remembering the letterforms from cards. But it was a start.

The little bits of evidence we have suggest it's not a good way, and that synthetic phonics is the way to go.

Teaching children to read is weirdly controversial though.

It backfired. She started way ahead of the other kids in school, which put tons of pressure on her to achieve and perform, eventually losing her love of learning at school. By sophomore year in highschool she was essentially "checked out" in spite of winning awards given to many community leaders of note today. She completed two years of undergrad (much of it on scholarship) and quit.

Ah that's too bad. It's unfortunate that most schools are geared toward the lowest common denominator and don't have the ability to provide advanced customized learning for those children that can handle it.

I am curious to know what you think about Larry Sanger's (a co-founder of Wikipedia) approach to this: http://larrysanger.org/wp-content/uploads/2010/12/How-and-Wh...

Way ahead of her time, but looks interesting!

What's the advantage of kids being kids for a while? So that parents can have cute young people to play with for a little longer?

Some people may enjoy their childhood, but I don't see why they wouldn't similarly enjoy life as younger adults. Kids learn to read earlier, then they move on to more productive pursuits earlier.

If anything, I think it's insane that we encourage people to behave like children well into their 20's (c.f. college students complaining about costumes that are too scary). Historically we didn't do this; the real question is what is the long term effect of treating 15-22 year olds like children.

Well we don't have to pick one or the other, there's plenty of middle ground. My argument is that there is plenty of learning going on that we don't measure. Social skills, dealing with emotions, listening and communicating, as the article discussed.

many in the technical fields (wrongly) don't consider those to be important or real skills

Because many in the technical fields don't have them.

I don't see how learning to read makes kids suddenly "not kids"

Most of us here, I would venture to guess, learned to read before Kindergarten. We can look at the group of people who learned to read as early as 2 already.

I wonder if this is true. In spite of doing well on measures of intelligence (particularly verbal) I was not an early reader.

edit: I had no patience for it but would spend most of my time building things out of wood/nails and legos.

I don't think I could 'read' before 3rd grade, as far as I can tell it had minimal long term negative impact. For reference I got an 800 on the English part of the PSAT.

PS: I also started to speaking at 3. There seems to be a huge emphasis on progressing as fast as possible, but in the long term a year or two has little meaning.

I was taught to read before school, not in kindergarten, but at home. I feel like it didn't do any harm, and my reading comprehension was top of my class until I entered high school, when I more or less stopped reading for pleasure altogether. I wasn't bored in class, because we picked our own books to read, so you could read at your own level.

I think that being taught some stuff at home might have stunted the development of my time management skills, because I could always complete the work in a very small part of the assigned time.

Mum had taught me some basic mathematical manipulations and "short-cuts", and I remember for a while I was ahead of the class in that too, again I wasn't bored though, because I just completed the problems quickly and then did my own thing. The problem was, when the level of difficulty caught up to my skill level again in high school, I was used to having time to muck around in class, and I never put in enough time and effort to finish the assigned work.

When I eventually have kids, I'll teach them anything they ask about, or need help with, but I'm going to trust their teachers with their core subjects by default.

The way I see it, the school material will be pretty straightforward, and easily remediated, but soft skills and self discipline are developed early on, and should not be interrupted for the sake of knowing how to simplify a fraction a year early.

edit:

Thinking about it more, it probably wasn't just my Mum that had made class too easy, the pace was probably a bit too slow for me anyway. When I entered high school, I was put into the advanced stream/track, but by that time my poor study habits were already formed. Perhaps there should have been multiple streams in primary school also.

It's common now for parents to put their kids in Kindergarten at the age they used to start first grade. My kid just made the cutoff but my wife wants to hold him back and some of his friends parents with kids born in January or march are holding their kids back a year.

Just keep in mind things can cut both ways. To this day I somewhat regret my parents doing this as throughout my entire K12 education I always ended up making friends that were a grade or two ahead since my classmates were much less mature. Which was ultimately frustrating. However, such experiences are certainly not the norm. In my case it had more to do with emotional and physical maturity than the academic.

I had the opposite problem - I was one of the youngest kids in my grade (turned 18 a few months after graduation), and while I never had any trouble relating on an emotional level, I was always much smaller than everyone else until my sophomore or junior year of HS.

Why can't reading and learning be part of being a kid?

OK I'll admit dorkiness in public, I loved Tom Swift books when I was a little boy. Couldn't have had my childhood without reading Tom Swift books, wouldn't trade it for anything. The first book I ever sat down and read front to back was the one with the triphibian atomic car. I was probably about 5. Do not want to hear bragging along the lines of "my first book was the Silmarillion at age 2" but I'm sure this was not a unique childhood experience, especially here.

I was referring more to early institutionalized learning. Kids naturally like to learn, so we should encourage that.

I actually assumed you were being sarcastic after the first 3 sentences, then I read further and realized you aren't.

My response to the question of "what will happen if they learn to read a year earlier" is that they will be a year ahead in learning to read of the previous generation.

I think it is incumbent upon you to explain why you think learning to read, write, etc. is a chore or something that shouldn't be part of very early childhood. I think later childhood makes it seem like a chore, but in reality these are very enjoyable pursuits!

You're generalizing in just the same way that the GP is. Whether learning to read and write is a chore or an enjoyable pursuit at that age varies from kid to kid. If it's an enjoyable pursuit, that's great. If it's a chore, then forcing that kid to do it because of some arbitrary standard applied to all kids might end up being a net negative. The gains from being able to read and write earlier might be outweighed by increased negative feelings associated with learning and teachers and school. As the OP said, this can cause students to become disengaged and actually fall behind others with whom a more patient approach was taken. It's basically a form of burnout, before the poor kids even reach double digits.

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