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Article: How early academic training retards intellectual developement


TheRobin

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Makes total sense to me! Here in finland children go to school at age 7 and pre-school at age 6 and every single time maths and numbers and reading was prsented to us we were bored and wanted to jsut get it over with (in pre school or in daycare that is) But math and reading was way more easier to understand when we went to shop/market with our parents and sponteniously read what the products were, waht they looked like, what symbols they had, how much did they cost and how was cost differant between sizes, kgs, liters and say chips vs potatoes :P

 

So when they pushed this on us it got us nowhere. Once we ourselves were interested at looking at numbers and langue THEN and only then was it at all successful :)

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Interesting article, got my mind blown a little at one of the studies they use as examples. Imo totally worth the read, enjoy :)

 

https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/freedom-learn/201506/how-early-academic-training-retards-intellectual-development

 

 

(3) Attempts to push reading can backfire.  Children (like all of us) resist being pushed into doing things they don’t want to do, and this applies to reading as much as to anything else.

 

Here is an example of typical stuff you see in these kinds of articles.  What does he mean by the term "push."  I don't mean to be a downer on this article, but it seems to be another case of baby and the bathwater.

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  • 2 weeks later...

Great article!  I highly recommend the previous article in the series that is linked in the first sentence of this article.  It focuses on the long term effects of academic training outside the classroom; the results of these studies are equally if not more mind blowing:

 

 

In a well-controlled experiment, begun by David Weikart and his colleagues in 1967, sixty eight high-poverty children living in Ypsilanti, Michigan, were assigned to one of three types of nursery schools:  Traditional (play-based), High/Scope (which was like the traditional but involved more adult guidance), and Direct Instruction (where the focus was on teaching reading, writing, and math, using worksheets and tests). The assignment was done in a semi-random way, designed to ensure that the three groups were initially matched on all available measures.  In addition to the daily preschool experiences, the experiment also included a home visit every two weeks, aimed at instructing parents in how to help their children.  These visits focused on the same sorts of methods as did the preschool classrooms.  Thus, home visits from the Traditional classrooms focused on the value of play and socialization while those from the Direct-Instruction classrooms focused on academic skills, worksheets, and the like...

 

...By age 15 those in the Direct Instruction group had committed, on average, more than twice as many “acts of misconduct” than had those in the other two groups.  At age 23, as young adults, the differences were even more dramatic.  Those in the Direct Instruction group had more instances of friction with other people, were more likely to have shown evidence of emotional impairment, were less likely to be married and living with their spouse, and were far more likely to have committed a crime than were those in the other two groups.  In fact, by age 23, 39% of those in the Direct Instruction group had felony arrest records compared to an average of 13.5% in the other two groups; and 19% of the Direct Instruction group had been cited for assault with a dangerous weapon compared with 0% in the other two groups.

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