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Comment by zmimon | Hacker News Reader

> there is a known phenomenon in the literature on education of gifted students of high-IQ young people being bored with school because it is underchallenging and getting poor grades

Reminds me of some of the parenting books I've been reading since we had our first child. The advice is generally not to try to teach your children to read ahead of when they do it in school. The reason being that you will probably achieve at best mediocre results at the expense of completely ruining the novelty of it for your child, guaranteeing that when time does come to learn and they are fully developmentally receptive, they will be far less interested than otherwise. Studies have shown that there is (on average) no developmental benefit from early reading and a mild possibility of negative impact.

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The advice is generally not to try to teach your children to read ahead of when they do it in school.

That seems like a classic example of throwing out the baby with the bathwater. Because we know that schools are slow and underchallenging, let's not let our children advance at all academically. That advice is not for me.

It's true that not all precocious readers become eminent adults, but maybe the mechanism that results in that observation is precisely that many schools are too lock-step in their organization

http://learninfreedom.org/age_grading_bad.html

and too likely to slow children down.

Reminds me of some of the parenting books I've been reading.... Studies have shown that there is (on average) no developmental benefit from early reading and a mild possibility of negative impact.

What books and studies suggest this?

The particular book where I read this is:

http://www.amazon.com/Expect-Toddler-Years-Arlene-Eisenberg/...

I went back and checked and unfortunately the book itself simply says "studies support the following general conclusions..." and don't give references (not exactly a scientific publication!).

Note that it's not in any way suggesting preventing children from learning to read if they want to and show an active interest, nor from stimulating them with an environment rich in reading-relevant material (games with letters, numbers etc.). It is simply saying that sitting them down and giving them lessons in how to read or anything else they are not developmentally ready for is probably going to be counterproductive.

Hmph, I'm teaching my kids to read as soon as I manage to interest them. But then I'm probably not going to send them the school till fourth or grade anyway.

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