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Comment by fred_durst | Hacker News Reader

> There's a lot of evidence that learning to read early can be detrimental in the long run. More and more of the educated parents I know are no longer focusing on teaching their preschoolers to read.

That's horrifying. Can't wait for the rest of us to have to clean up their experiment.

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What are you basing that on? There is evidence that not teaching children to read until age 6 or 7 has an overall net benefit.

Many countries ranked very well for education, don't start formal education until age 7 (Finland and Sweden for instance). The children in these countries are taught to read later than in the US, but they do just as well or better on reading tests later in life.

Children in the US weren't taught to read until first grade a few generations ago. Hell, when I was in kindergarten, 25 years ago, we spent the whole year learning the alphabet--now kids are expected to know the alphabet by the time they enter kindergarten. There is no evidence that this is beneficial and plenty that it is harmful.

Why wait for the state to teach your kid to read? I wouldn't trust an elementary public school teacher to build IKEA furniture let alone teach my kid the most important skill he'll ever learn.

Most importantly, once they learn how to read they won't have to wait for or trust the state to teach them anything ever again; it's all there for free on the internet and in library books.

Care to cite some of this evidence? I was just reading about this and found zero evidence its somehow harmful and only anecdotal evidence that it is not beneficial and "evens out" later.

Children in New Zealand who began learning to read at age 7 had better reading comprehension than those that started at age 5 by the time they were 10.

http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0885200612...

Children in Germany who started school at age 7 performed better on standardized tests than those who started at age 6.

http://ftp.iza.org/dp1827.pdf

You have to be careful with these studies - it's possible (and the authors of the research article are worried about this) that the later learners had parents who consciously chose to teach them later.

This sort of decision implies a level of involvement in a child's education that might, on its own, lead to better reading comprehension.

Even if that were true, I would have learned much less as there were many things I and many children learned via reading far before the age of 11. So while they supposedly caught up on reading, they had missed out on several years of learning when the brain is most capable of doing so.

And honestly, that study is so loose. It reminds of the good ol' days of Whole Word learning and how many kids lives they screwed up with that experiment gone bad.

http://www.readinghorizons.com/research/whole-language-vs-ph...

EDIT: Apparently, I need to clarify loose. Sample size: 267

>So while they supposedly caught up on reading, they had missed out on several years of learning when the brain is most capable of doing so.

Reading is not the only way to learn, and before a certain age it looks like it's not the most effective. There are many more studies that show that a play based education up until age 7 is superior to a rigorous academic education at the same age.

The evidence shows that it is very likely that spending an extra 2 years playing, and exploring is better than spending that time in the class practicing reading picture books.

Older children also progress faster, so an 8 year old who started learning to read at age 7 is reading much more sophisticated material than a 6 year old who started at age 5. It's not like there is an equivalent 2 year loss of reading time.

>And honestly, that study is so loose.

Care to offer some meaningful critique.

>how many kids lives they screwed up with that experiment gone bad.

In this case starting school later is not the experiment. It was the way things were for most of human history.

Schooling at 4 and 5 years old is a very recent invention--the data doesn't back up its effectiveness--so we should eliminate it.

Edit: In response to the above edit. There is nothing inherently wrong with a sample size of 267. That's actually a fairly large sample size for studies like this. My brother is a grad student in applied linguistics. He'd kill for 267 study participants for his second language acquisition research.

That's because the children that learned at age 7 weren't educated enough to understand that cramming for a standardized test was a waste of their lives.

Do you have evidence that teaching a child to read at 7 years of age is a significant detriment to their overall learning? Do you feel like the parent post that not teaching them to read at 4 years old is 'child abuse?'

My strong opinion is that educationally, THE most important thing you must do with your child is TALK to them. From the beginning. From year 0. Discuss things with them. Let them soak as much understandable speech as they can between years 0 and 2. This will have a far more profound effect in their life rather than did they learn to read at 4 or 8 years of age.

Could you specify what is horrifying about the previous post? Why would it be more important for a 5 year old to learn to read rather than, say, spend their time building Legos, practice crafts or climbing into trees? Like another poster stated, most kids in Finland do not start to formally learn to read until they are 6 (preschool, if the parents want so) and at the latest when they enter primary school (7). I would claim Finland has a pretty good public primary education system.

Pushing kids to do too much too soon has no advantages, imho. There are skills that are best started acquiring at a youngish age but you will have to convince me pretty hard that reading is one of them. Kids have this natural curiosity to an amazing variety of things. But what those things are can be quite random. The best way to have them learn something is to apply this natural curiosity - i.e. find what they are interested in - and the support them in this activity. This does not mean allowing them play videogames or watch cartoons whole the whole day.

I would say if the kids like it and want to then sure, teach them to read. But before 7, I would claim it is more valuable to find those things that they are really keen into and let them practice those. This creates a positive association to knowledge acquisition (the love of learning). And at that age they soak information and skills like sponges if they are motivated and have the mental capacity to grasp the concepts.

> Why would it be more important for a 5 year old to learn to read rather than, say, spend their time building Legos, practice crafts or climbing into trees?

The hypothesis that I think should be tested is whether there is correlation between being a child prodigy in a technical field (in math, physics, computer science or engineering) and getting to read early.

It makes sense theoretically -- if you learn to read by age 8, is there enough time for you to grasp all of high school math and computer science by age 14, like Manjul Bhargava?

While I can imagine my hypothesis being true, that doesn't make it into an argument against later reading age. It just means that for a group of kids this might not the best decision. (And since most of us think of themselves as the "smart kids", maybe that's why a lot of us here are opposed to it.)

> The hypothesis that I think should be tested is whether there is correlation between being a child prodigy in a technical field ... and getting to read early.

It would be cool if all children could be helped to find the thing they are good at and love and let them become the best they can in that field through positive reinforcement and minimum coercion.

> It makes sense theoretically -- if you learn to read by age 8, is there enough time for you to grasp all of high school math and computer science by age 14, like Manjul Bhargava?

I think the most important thing what you can extract from the case of the Field's medalist is that he seems to enjoy what he does.

Usually when lots of parents are really ambituous about their childrens futures they force their children to rote-learn lots of mundane knowledge or repeat tiring exercises... such an approach leads most of the time to lots of sad adults with average achievements. I would much prefer lots of content and happy adults with average achievements.

The prodigies will happen, but it would be really nasty to force all children to try to be prodigies.

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