Teaching infants to swim, toddlers to play the violin, preschoolers to read, write, and work out complicated mathematical problems: Can it be done? Should it be done?
Glenn Doman, founder and chairman of The Institute for the Achievement of Human Potential, is just one of several in the child development field who shouts a resounding YES! Research shows that the human brain grows rapidly during the first six years of life and has an incredible capacity for soaking up data. Thus some child-development experts urge parents to take advantage of this period of super learning and give their children an academic boost.
Doman, in his book How to Multiply Your Baby's Intelligence, states that it's easy to teach a six-month-old baby to read because "all children are linguistic geniuses from birth." Doman is making a significant contribution to what he terms the "Gentle Revolution" movement, designed to "give all parents the knowledge required to make their babies highly intelligent, extremely capable and delightful children, and by so doing to make a highly humane, sane and decent world."
Doman's "superkids," for the most part, are created and not born, which means that any parent can teach any child to excel academically even before they are old enough to cross the street by themselves. One four-year-old in Doman's program, for example, reads independently from an encyclopedia. A two-year-old reportedly reads Japanese and is currently learning algebra and geometry. Another child began talking at six months and is already reciting poetry at a year. One little boy could read five thousand words, do arithmetic, and play a recognizable tune on the violin by the age of one-and-a-half. And another, at two-and-a-half years, reads ten library books per week.
Let Children Be Children
Along with every attempted "revolution," particularly when it involves children, there is controversy. More and more experts in the child-development field, after having observed some of the noticeable effects early education is having on very young children, are speaking out quite strongly against it. Their major concern is that today's parents, in their zeal to give their sons and daughters a good academic start, are losing sight of their child's need to be a child.
These experts also recognize the preschooler's capacity for learning but believe that these small children are already in an accelerated educational program. They are learning to crawl, walk, run, comprehend and use thousand of words, interact socially, and understand the world around them.
David Elkind, professor of child study at Tufts University, says in his book Miseducation: Preschoolers at Risk,
When we instruct children in academic subjects, or in
swimming, gymnastics or ballet, at too early an age, we
miseducate them; we put them at risk for short-term stress
and long-term personality damage for no useful purpose.
There is no evidence that such early instruction
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