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Comment by ashark | Hacker News Reader

> We used to let our 3 y/o watch youtube. She learned lots of things from there which was amazing. Colors, Numbers, the alphabet; all by the time she was 2. I'm not a teacher by any means so it was awesome to see this happen.

It's entirely possible the videos made this happen, or at least helped, but some kids just develop that stuff crazy-early. My daughter saw little video content before age two, and very little Youtube, but achieved all the same in the same timeframe with only basic work on our part. It was natural for her—she broke a 200-word working vocabulary by 14 months, could already count sets of things under ten, could name most letters of the alphabet, and so on. By age 2 she sounded like your average 4-year-old. Youtube had nothing to do with it, and we barely had anything to do with it. That was just her.

My son, on the other hand...

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I recall some research that showed that very young children did not pick up language from watching TV. It required an adult to closely interact with the child to learn language.

http://vancouversun.com/news/staff-blogs/why-your-kid-cant-l...

Years ago, a friend of mine was thrilled with Sesame Street, because after watching it for a year his daughter learned most of her letters and could count to 10.

I replied that sounded like the most inefficient method of teaching ever devised. Not what he wanted to hear :-)

That's complete bunk. I was fluent in English by the age of 7-8 entirely from having watched a ton of TCC (a British kids channel) on my own. I'm sure adult aid helps, but it is in no way necessary.

I'm from Sweden btw

I think the original comment applies to one’s first language, as opposed to later languages

That's right, and also to very young children, like 2-4. 7-8 year olds are very different.

Many Europeans told me they learned English from watching TV as children.

Seconded. In my case it was The Secret of Monkey Island, Dune II and an insatiable appetite for more digital worlds to escape into - PC Format, Pc Gamer magazines...

Complete bunk is brandishing one's own anectodal evidence to try to invalidate scientific consensus based on a few decades of countless studies.

IINM there are several of these.

Yeah. It's pretty amazing the speeds at which kids learn but seem to "even" up as they get older. My son is doing this completely different than my daughter. At 3, I can barely get my daughter to eat and my son at 7 months flips out if we don't feed him real food when we're eating now.

I know your children are younger, but there is definitely something about school that brings out the lowest-common-denominator in all of us

IIRC, one tidbit broughr up in "The genius factory" was that while preschooling seems to result in accelerated development, any such differences are erased after a few years if school. The conclusion made in that book seemed to be that specialized teaching programmes don't provide long-term benefits, but maybe it's just that a one-size-fits-all schooling system will force more advanced kids to conform to a lower standard...

It's almost as if genetics are king.

This is true although nobody likes to admit this. Intelligence, including specific subfields of intelligence, is highly heritable, explaining about 70% of variance.

I find 70% oddly specific. Citation?

0.75 is usual estimate of heritability of IQ. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heritability_of_IQ

It's worth pointing out that heritability only looks at relative contributions within the population under study. If the population under study has a terrible education system, it can be simultaneously true that IQ is highly heritable, and also that the education system could be vastly improved, and also that in a different education system IQ. would not be as heritable.

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