All that time and effort wasted and even doing harm. Extracting defeat from the jaws of victory. Pre-school "academic" what? I can't think of anything very si

All that time and effort wasted and even doing harm. Extracting defeat from the jaws of victory. Pre-school "academic" what? I can't think of anything very significant and non-trivial in academics before, say, the ninth grade. Academics can start to get severe for some majors by, say, the junior year of college, e.g., a physics major may want to know differential geometry and exterior algebra. The real challenge in academics is research, if want to take such a career direction. Learn "the days of the week"? Can't remember when I didn't know those. Maybe Mom or Dad went over them say, several times over a period of two weeks. The alphabet? There is a little song for that. Reading? Somehow by the second grade or so, I basically knew how to read. Arithmetic? Learn to add and subtract single digit numbers and memorize the multiplication table, and then apply those to the rest of arithmetic. I have a friend who went to a terrible school, and somewhere in the early grades got sick and was at home for some days. There his mother was shocked to discover that he couldn't read. So, in two weeks, she taught him. He was PBK at Suny and got his Ph.D. in mathematics at Courant. Here's one: Since we are awash in computers, early on teach touch typing -- that is, let the kids learn where the a-z keys are. K-12? Let be mostly play.