8 ms·

I can see homeschooling being potentially more interesting/engaging for a certain kind of student after the basics are out of the way, but this: > He didn't ev

by ohazi 6y ago

I can see homeschooling being potentially more interesting/engaging for a certain kind of student after the basics are out of the way, but this: > He didn't even learn how to read until he was around 10. to me, is fucking terrifying. All of the people I know who did better on their own than in a classroom were able to do so because they could gobble up half a library in a weekend. I think you need to be able to read abnormally well for this unschooling concept to work as intended, and so good reading skills is one of the few things that I absolutely would not compromise on.

abfan1127 6y ago
having met a ton of fully grown adults who have offspring, near as I can tell, most people are functionally illiterate. While they probably can read, most choose not to read anything longer than a tweet. I coach in a local sports league. I send an email at the beginning of each season with nice bulleted sections about schedules, uniforms, etc. After I send that email, I spend the next week answering questions to responses to replies from that email. All answers are in that email they are responding to. TLDR - just because someone can read, doesn't mean they will, and my experience is that they won't.
- ohazi 6y ago
  A hurried parent not bothering to read a syllabus is not equivalent to a curious kid blitzing through every single Wikipedia article about dinosaurs. Both require literacy, but one of these things is fun, while the other is a chore.
  - abfan1127 6y ago
    the OP inferred that not reading until 10 was suboptimal. I argue that effectively, most people don't read in adulthood. So, if he's frightened by a 10yo not reading, he's in for a rude awakening when he gets to interface with adults. Perhaps they are unrelated. perhaps I drew a wrong conclusion. But perhaps they aren't hurried, they are just lazy.
    - ohazi 6y ago
      Are you really trying to draw an equivalence between laziness and illiteracy? It's okay for an adult to be lazy. It's okay for a kid to be lazy. It's probably not great for a homeschooled kid to be lazy, but you can invent games and rewards and other incentives and make this work. But it's irresponsible parenting to allow your homeschooled kid to be illiterate at 10. You're not going to convince me otherwise with comparisons to lazy parents not wanting to read your boring emails. It is so obviously not the same thing. The whole concept behind unschooling is that you allow a child to find the things that they find interesting, and then allow them to voraciously teach themselves as much as they can, as fast as they can. This doesn't work at all if your kid can't read.
      - abfan1127 6y ago
        why can "a kid" be lazy, but not a "homeschooled kid? What's the role of literacy if you don't use it? What's the use of literacy without engagement? There are lots of ways to learn things without reading. While I personally taught my kids reading at an earlier age than 10 (they are also not home-schooled), I've also seen kids learn "late" but still learn as needed. I also see a ton of kids who can't read even though they were "taught it" early. On a side note, Montessori methods for teaching are quite interesting in how they use materials to teach concepts most traditional schools rely on abstract ideas and worksheets. They don't need to read to do the Montessori materials, but worksheets certainly require some level of reading to understand what's to be done.
        ohazi 6y ago
        Did you read the article? If an adult doesn't want to use their literacy, that's their choice, but the unschooling method requires that a kid be able to use their literacy to learn things that interest them at their own pace. A lazy child is going to need additional motivation for unschooling to be effective. An illiterate child is going to have an "at their own pace" that's close to zero. If you're a parent, and you think you're homeschooling your kid with this "unschooling" method, and they still can't read at ten, then you, as a parent, need to drop the charade that unschooling is working for your kid and teach them how to fucking read, stat.
- leetcrew 6y ago
  I'm sure some of the parents are just refusing to read your email carefully, but I think people also overestimate how clear their writing is. I do read written policies very carefully, but I often misinterpret things because I read more literally than the author expected. if it's something important (eg, specifications at work), I will rewrite the ambiguous passage in my own words and ask the author / person in charge if it's a correct interpretation. this annoys people sometimes, but it makes it not my fault if I misunderstand :)
  - abfan1127 6y ago
    I'm certain they are refusing to read it. I try to be sensitive to thinking I'm being clear when in reality I'm not. Here is a screen grab of a typical email. https://imgur.com/5d36jpq https://imgur.com/5d36jpq The first questions I get are "when is first practice".
    - leetcrew 6y ago
      this is actually a good example to demonstrate my point. you don't explicitly say when the first practice is, only that they recur every tuesday and friday. the "see you next tuesday!" strongly implies that the first practice is the tuesday that immediately follows, but the reader doesn't get this needed context until the very end of the email. I bet if you put something like "starting next tuesday (dd/mm/yyyy)" in the Practices section, you would get fewer of those questions. all the information is there for an active reader to figure out what they need to do, but I can see how a linear reader (who isn't holding all the information in their head to begin with) could miss it. I had to reread the email to know exactly when the first practice would be. an extremely pedantic reader might be unsure whether "see you next tuesday!" refers to a second informational meeting or the first actual practice.
      - abfan1127 6y ago
        This is a great point. If I may, I get 2 types of questions on this specific point. "When is first practice?" which is a good question as you point out. I also get " when are practices" which is pretty clear unless they have poorly phrased "when is first practice" with this question and now we've both committed the same error. Good point either way.
- sjg007 6y ago
  Your emails are too long. It’s extremely difficult to read multiple paragraphs in an email. Same with a HN comment.
- epr 6y ago
  > All answers are in that email they are responding to. My gf works in inside technical sales for an industrial instruments rep/distributor, and therefore a large part of her job is passing information between customers and manufacturers while trying to keep both happy and process orders. On a good day, she probably is forced to send the same requests for information at least two or three times on average before finally getting an answer. People just refuse to read even extremely short emails asking for straightforward information like shipping addresses which simply must be provided to proceed with the order. I wouldn't last a month doing her job without losing my damn mind.
  - abfan1127 6y ago
    Your GF is a saint. This is a good place for AI to read the original email, and reply with snippets. If the AI isn't very good, it doesn't really matter because they probably aren't reading it anyways. :|
walshemj 6y ago
A lot of nordic countries don't teach reading until 7 or so
- saberdancer 6y ago
  When is reading taught in the USA? In Europe, first grade is usually when you are 7 years old, so normally that's when it is taught. Sure, nowadays kids tend to learn it earlier but not through organized means.
  - wolfram74 6y ago
    I was a pretty rubbish reader until 3rd or 4th grade when Legend of the Seven Stars came out for SNES and my sister eventually got tired of reading the dialogue for me. So that would put me in the 10 year old range.
    - Twisol 6y ago
      Sibling of someone like you here -- I absolutely got fed up with reading Animal Crossing dialogue for my sister, and I maintain that's the only reason she finally learned to read. Motivation is one thing -- necessity is another. If you need it (not just want; literally need it for some reason), you'll have a pretty strong motivation to acquire it. (Or give up. But that's where parental guidance comes in.)
      - sjg007 6y ago
        My kids reading has really accelerated from playing Roblox. I mean they did read before but they’ve really taken off since. They use Siri to dictate and I surmise they read what she prints. It’s amazing.
  - bart_spoon 6y ago
    My daughter started kindergarten this year and they are teaching reading. She’s 5, but she’s among the youngest in her grade, with the older kids having turned 6 already. Keep in mind this is all very simple books in the “See Spot Run” category of difficulty for the most part. She actually had already started learning some reading at 4 when she was in preschool. It was mostly just sounding out letters but at that point kids can start to sound out simple words too. Preschool is elective though so plenty of kids won’t start that young.
morpheuskafka 6y ago
Agreed, I would expect that early child literacy is pretty critical for this. Now once you get to age 10, you can pretty much just start reading random books (or anything really) and start picking up new vocab and grammar skills quickly, and probably turn out alright. But if you can't read period, that's not going to happen. If anything, I would say the focus on unschooling when it comes to early childhood should be read early and read often. Interestingly, this seems to play into the larger controversy of intensive phonics instruction vs. the less structured "whole language approach."
somethoughts 6y ago
I think a safer approach would be "home after schooling" or to follow this new terminology "unafterschooling". Basically give kids time for unstructured learning using the hours after school/after homework study time that are currently effectively used up toiling at zero sum, super structured activities strictly aimed at getting into college.
- abraae 6y ago
  In other words, a 1970s childhood.
- sfink 6y ago
  So you're going to send kids to 7 or so hours of being pressured into paying attention to stuff they're generally not that interested in learning, then some amount of time doing mostly make-work activities, and you expect them to be interested in exploring learning opportunities in the minimal remaining bits of time? (And for older grades, they're also getting up well before their bodies want to.) Would you be able to sustain enough interest to really delve into something when you're that tired out? Structured activities still work, because the motivation is largely external. I reserve judgement as to how good that is for the kids doing them, but I will agree that it's a workable setup. IMHO, you can't go halfway. Either you fill up their time with supposedly educational/socializing opportunities, or you give them enough time and space to explore based on intrinsic motivation. With your "unafterschooling", your kids will naturally use it for playtime or zombie screen time. One, or possibly both, of those is likely to be the best possible use of that time, so that's ok; just don't expect them to pick up new skills when you've stacked the odds against it. (Yes, I'm biased. I'm homeschooling -- not unschooling -- my kids, and there was a major readjustment period to get free of the "school attitude" before things started to click. We couldn't have done that when school was still in their headspace.)
  - TheAdamAndChe 6y ago
    Kids learn through play and curiosity. I learned vast amounts after school from video games, and I read before going to sleep. Personally I could have used more socialization, but there is plenty of time after school to learn.
brigandish 6y ago
A friend of mine had children that went to Steiner schools and they weren't taught to read until they were 7, and he said they could read adult level books by 9. It appears there's evidence that this is true in general[1] (though the author suggests they could go even faster if they updated their methods further) I also remember reading in a Tony Buzan book his speculation that learning to read too early interfered with the, what he claims, is the natural eidetic memory potential in children. I don't have any of his books here to find the reference, unfortunately. Perhaps there's something in it, perhaps not. [1] https://theconversation.com/steiner-schools-should-adopt-modern-reading-methods-30298 https://theconversation.com/steiner-schools-should-adopt-mod...
- Nasrudith 6y ago
  I personally learned to read as early as I could recall (around four) but lacked much attention span to actually crack open a book then and found being read to more fun. Not as a matter of personal bragging but to point out that kids in absense of formal teaching methods may absorb many things. Immersion learning is used and studied mostly for foreign languages but I wonder about how effective it proves in general for small children given vs trying to teach them actively and leaving them to observe it. It may be a fringe case technique when directly teaching them is ironically less effective or even more effective when it does work but unreliable.
  - moonchild 6y ago
    I learned to read at a similar age, and quickly started reading (relatively) long, complex books. I have difficulty focusing on things, but I think the many hours spent on focused reading at an early age helped significantly; I would probably be in a much worse state now if not for that. Just providing another perspective.
hobs 6y ago
I think you are right on one level, reading and reading comprehension is absolutely required for self driven learning (at least before youtube, and yeah, even with youtube.) For what it's worth I didnt learn to read until I was 9 and by 11 had a college age reading level. I think some of the later learners in reading (who were not disabled, or at least not traditionally disabled) might also have some other correlations.
quesera 6y ago
> to me, is fucking terrifying. The non-intuitive thing about basic reading and math skills is this: If you delay the learning, you learn it much more quickly. So the (ordinary, with no developmental issues) kid who doesn't read until 10, can exceed his or her peers in just a couple years. The very unfortunate corollary, however, is this: The kid with developmental issues might go undiagnosed for a longer time than necessary, with long-lasting repercussions and follow-on effects. It's even possible to reinforce a mild issue and turn it into a larger one. This then becomes a classical optimization problem. Optimize for the common case for broad benefit, or optimize for the rare case with significant negative effects. There is no right answer for everyone.
- xkgt 6y ago
  // If you delay the learning, you learn it much more quickly. Is there any source for this?
  - freshhawk 6y ago
    Older children learn things faster than younger children, why would reading be an exception?
    - thotsBgone 6y ago
      This is not true for everything, like speaking. If you don't learn language in the critical period, you will never master it.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
barry-cotter 6y ago
> to me, is fucking terrifying. Why? It takes 40 contact hours to teach a nine year old to read, according to John Taylor Gatto. You can teach all of primary school Math in the same time to a 12 year old. What’s the point of doing it earlier? There are little or no compounding gains from doing so. Countries that start teaching reading at 4 don’t do better than those that wait until 7. See France versus Germany or Finland. The entire point of the zone of proximal development is that you can spend weeks teaching something to a six year old that a nine year old will pick up in an afternoon because they’re just more developed.
- hndamien 6y ago
  I taught a 5 year old to read to a 15 year old level in 20 contact hours for reference. Still room for improvement qualitatively but I think an observing scientist would say that they can read well, but not smoothly like an adult.
  - Foobar8568 6y ago
    My teacher daughter was shocked she could read at 5,diring our first meeting she asked us : "do you know she can read?" I replied, "yes I know", she followed up with a "like an adult" almost frightened haha. Well I did tell her that she could read and write, I guess she was used of parents bullshitting on their kids achievements. Remove a screen and a kid can have crazy skills. Screens are really the opium of the people.
    - marcus_holmes 6y ago
      I grew up before screens, and we didn't have crazy skills.
      - Foobar8568 6y ago
        TV has been there as a main parenting tool from at least the 80s. Unless your parents were mixing alcohol with your milk, you had better skills than this current era one.
MisterBastahrd 6y ago
I'm pretty sure that if local officials were aware of this, they'd straight up take the child out of the home in most US states.
petertodd 6y ago
>> He didn't even learn how to read until he was around 10. > to me, is fucking terrifying. I could barely read at age 10, and I was in public school! That's why my parents took me out and homeschooled me. Which fixed the problem in a few months with intensive one-on-one phonics from my mom that the school system just wasn't going to do.
rimliu 6y ago
> All of the people I know who did better on their own > than in a classroom were able to do so because they > could gobble up half a library in a weekend. Can confirm. Small rural school (primary and middle), half of the teachers were not specialists on the subjects they taught. We were supposed to be learning English from the grade 4, but we had a "proper" English teacher for a year and then were taught by people who knew no English themselves. But I read a lot and it helped. I managed to be among the best students onward: be it the secondary school or the university. My take is: good teachers can motivate and inspire you a lot, but bad teachers can be ignored and should not hinder your education. I agree with Mark Twain here: "I have never let my schooling interfere with my education".

by ohazi 6y ago

abfan1127 6y ago

having met a ton of fully grown adults who have offspring, near as I can tell, most people are functionally illiterate. While they probably can read, most choose not to read anything longer than a tweet. I coach in a local sports league. I send an email at the beginning of each season with nice bulleted sections about schedules, uniforms, etc. After I send that email, I spend the next week answering questions to responses to replies from that email. All answers are in that email they are responding to. TLDR - just because someone can read, doesn't mean they will, and my experience is that they won't.

ohazi 6y ago
A hurried parent not bothering to read a syllabus is not equivalent to a curious kid blitzing through every single Wikipedia article about dinosaurs. Both require literacy, but one of these things is fun, while the other is a chore.
- abfan1127 6y ago
  the OP inferred that not reading until 10 was suboptimal. I argue that effectively, most people don't read in adulthood. So, if he's frightened by a 10yo not reading, he's in for a rude awakening when he gets to interface with adults. Perhaps they are unrelated. perhaps I drew a wrong conclusion. But perhaps they aren't hurried, they are just lazy.
  - ohazi 6y ago
    Are you really trying to draw an equivalence between laziness and illiteracy? It's okay for an adult to be lazy. It's okay for a kid to be lazy. It's probably not great for a homeschooled kid to be lazy, but you can invent games and rewards and other incentives and make this work. But it's irresponsible parenting to allow your homeschooled kid to be illiterate at 10. You're not going to convince me otherwise with comparisons to lazy parents not wanting to read your boring emails. It is so obviously not the same thing. The whole concept behind unschooling is that you allow a child to find the things that they find interesting, and then allow them to voraciously teach themselves as much as they can, as fast as they can. This doesn't work at all if your kid can't read.
    - abfan1127 6y ago
      why can "a kid" be lazy, but not a "homeschooled kid? What's the role of literacy if you don't use it? What's the use of literacy without engagement? There are lots of ways to learn things without reading. While I personally taught my kids reading at an earlier age than 10 (they are also not home-schooled), I've also seen kids learn "late" but still learn as needed. I also see a ton of kids who can't read even though they were "taught it" early. On a side note, Montessori methods for teaching are quite interesting in how they use materials to teach concepts most traditional schools rely on abstract ideas and worksheets. They don't need to read to do the Montessori materials, but worksheets certainly require some level of reading to understand what's to be done.
      - ohazi 6y ago
        Did you read the article? If an adult doesn't want to use their literacy, that's their choice, but the unschooling method requires that a kid be able to use their literacy to learn things that interest them at their own pace. A lazy child is going to need additional motivation for unschooling to be effective. An illiterate child is going to have an "at their own pace" that's close to zero. If you're a parent, and you think you're homeschooling your kid with this "unschooling" method, and they still can't read at ten, then you, as a parent, need to drop the charade that unschooling is working for your kid and teach them how to fucking read, stat.
leetcrew 6y ago
I'm sure some of the parents are just refusing to read your email carefully, but I think people also overestimate how clear their writing is. I do read written policies very carefully, but I often misinterpret things because I read more literally than the author expected. if it's something important (eg, specifications at work), I will rewrite the ambiguous passage in my own words and ask the author / person in charge if it's a correct interpretation. this annoys people sometimes, but it makes it not my fault if I misunderstand :)
- abfan1127 6y ago
  I'm certain they are refusing to read it. I try to be sensitive to thinking I'm being clear when in reality I'm not. Here is a screen grab of a typical email. https://imgur.com/5d36jpq https://imgur.com/5d36jpq The first questions I get are "when is first practice".
  - leetcrew 6y ago
    this is actually a good example to demonstrate my point. you don't explicitly say when the first practice is, only that they recur every tuesday and friday. the "see you next tuesday!" strongly implies that the first practice is the tuesday that immediately follows, but the reader doesn't get this needed context until the very end of the email. I bet if you put something like "starting next tuesday (dd/mm/yyyy)" in the Practices section, you would get fewer of those questions. all the information is there for an active reader to figure out what they need to do, but I can see how a linear reader (who isn't holding all the information in their head to begin with) could miss it. I had to reread the email to know exactly when the first practice would be. an extremely pedantic reader might be unsure whether "see you next tuesday!" refers to a second informational meeting or the first actual practice.
    - abfan1127 6y ago
      This is a great point. If I may, I get 2 types of questions on this specific point. "When is first practice?" which is a good question as you point out. I also get " when are practices" which is pretty clear unless they have poorly phrased "when is first practice" with this question and now we've both committed the same error. Good point either way.
sjg007 6y ago
Your emails are too long. It’s extremely difficult to read multiple paragraphs in an email. Same with a HN comment.
epr 6y ago
> All answers are in that email they are responding to. My gf works in inside technical sales for an industrial instruments rep/distributor, and therefore a large part of her job is passing information between customers and manufacturers while trying to keep both happy and process orders. On a good day, she probably is forced to send the same requests for information at least two or three times on average before finally getting an answer. People just refuse to read even extremely short emails asking for straightforward information like shipping addresses which simply must be provided to proceed with the order. I wouldn't last a month doing her job without losing my damn mind.
- abfan1127 6y ago
  Your GF is a saint. This is a good place for AI to read the original email, and reply with snippets. If the AI isn't very good, it doesn't really matter because they probably aren't reading it anyways. :|

walshemj 6y ago

A lot of nordic countries don't teach reading until 7 or so

saberdancer 6y ago
When is reading taught in the USA? In Europe, first grade is usually when you are 7 years old, so normally that's when it is taught. Sure, nowadays kids tend to learn it earlier but not through organized means.
- wolfram74 6y ago
  I was a pretty rubbish reader until 3rd or 4th grade when Legend of the Seven Stars came out for SNES and my sister eventually got tired of reading the dialogue for me. So that would put me in the 10 year old range.
  - Twisol 6y ago
    Sibling of someone like you here -- I absolutely got fed up with reading Animal Crossing dialogue for my sister, and I maintain that's the only reason she finally learned to read. Motivation is one thing -- necessity is another. If you need it (not just want; literally need it for some reason), you'll have a pretty strong motivation to acquire it. (Or give up. But that's where parental guidance comes in.)
    - sjg007 6y ago
      My kids reading has really accelerated from playing Roblox. I mean they did read before but they’ve really taken off since. They use Siri to dictate and I surmise they read what she prints. It’s amazing.
- bart_spoon 6y ago
  My daughter started kindergarten this year and they are teaching reading. She’s 5, but she’s among the youngest in her grade, with the older kids having turned 6 already. Keep in mind this is all very simple books in the “See Spot Run” category of difficulty for the most part. She actually had already started learning some reading at 4 when she was in preschool. It was mostly just sounding out letters but at that point kids can start to sound out simple words too. Preschool is elective though so plenty of kids won’t start that young.

morpheuskafka 6y ago

Agreed, I would expect that early child literacy is pretty critical for this. Now once you get to age 10, you can pretty much just start reading random books (or anything really) and start picking up new vocab and grammar skills quickly, and probably turn out alright. But if you can't read period, that's not going to happen. If anything, I would say the focus on unschooling when it comes to early childhood should be read early and read often. Interestingly, this seems to play into the larger controversy of intensive phonics instruction vs. the less structured "whole language approach."

somethoughts 6y ago

I think a safer approach would be "home after schooling" or to follow this new terminology "unafterschooling". Basically give kids time for unstructured learning using the hours after school/after homework study time that are currently effectively used up toiling at zero sum, super structured activities strictly aimed at getting into college.

abraae 6y ago
In other words, a 1970s childhood.
sfink 6y ago
So you're going to send kids to 7 or so hours of being pressured into paying attention to stuff they're generally not that interested in learning, then some amount of time doing mostly make-work activities, and you expect them to be interested in exploring learning opportunities in the minimal remaining bits of time? (And for older grades, they're also getting up well before their bodies want to.) Would you be able to sustain enough interest to really delve into something when you're that tired out? Structured activities still work, because the motivation is largely external. I reserve judgement as to how good that is for the kids doing them, but I will agree that it's a workable setup. IMHO, you can't go halfway. Either you fill up their time with supposedly educational/socializing opportunities, or you give them enough time and space to explore based on intrinsic motivation. With your "unafterschooling", your kids will naturally use it for playtime or zombie screen time. One, or possibly both, of those is likely to be the best possible use of that time, so that's ok; just don't expect them to pick up new skills when you've stacked the odds against it. (Yes, I'm biased. I'm homeschooling -- not unschooling -- my kids, and there was a major readjustment period to get free of the "school attitude" before things started to click. We couldn't have done that when school was still in their headspace.)
- TheAdamAndChe 6y ago
  Kids learn through play and curiosity. I learned vast amounts after school from video games, and I read before going to sleep. Personally I could have used more socialization, but there is plenty of time after school to learn.

brigandish 6y ago

A friend of mine had children that went to Steiner schools and they weren't taught to read until they were 7, and he said they could read adult level books by 9. It appears there's evidence that this is true in general[1] (though the author suggests they could go even faster if they updated their methods further) I also remember reading in a Tony Buzan book his speculation that learning to read too early interfered with the, what he claims, is the natural eidetic memory potential in children. I don't have any of his books here to find the reference, unfortunately. Perhaps there's something in it, perhaps not. [1] https://theconversation.com/steiner-schools-should-adopt-modern-reading-methods-30298 https://theconversation.com/steiner-schools-should-adopt-mod...

Nasrudith 6y ago
I personally learned to read as early as I could recall (around four) but lacked much attention span to actually crack open a book then and found being read to more fun. Not as a matter of personal bragging but to point out that kids in absense of formal teaching methods may absorb many things. Immersion learning is used and studied mostly for foreign languages but I wonder about how effective it proves in general for small children given vs trying to teach them actively and leaving them to observe it. It may be a fringe case technique when directly teaching them is ironically less effective or even more effective when it does work but unreliable.
- moonchild 6y ago
  I learned to read at a similar age, and quickly started reading (relatively) long, complex books. I have difficulty focusing on things, but I think the many hours spent on focused reading at an early age helped significantly; I would probably be in a much worse state now if not for that. Just providing another perspective.

hobs 6y ago

I think you are right on one level, reading and reading comprehension is absolutely required for self driven learning (at least before youtube, and yeah, even with youtube.) For what it's worth I didnt learn to read until I was 9 and by 11 had a college age reading level. I think some of the later learners in reading (who were not disabled, or at least not traditionally disabled) might also have some other correlations.

quesera 6y ago

> to me, is fucking terrifying. The non-intuitive thing about basic reading and math skills is this: If you delay the learning, you learn it much more quickly. So the (ordinary, with no developmental issues) kid who doesn't read until 10, can exceed his or her peers in just a couple years. The very unfortunate corollary, however, is this: The kid with developmental issues might go undiagnosed for a longer time than necessary, with long-lasting repercussions and follow-on effects. It's even possible to reinforce a mild issue and turn it into a larger one. This then becomes a classical optimization problem. Optimize for the common case for broad benefit, or optimize for the rare case with significant negative effects. There is no right answer for everyone.

xkgt 6y ago
// If you delay the learning, you learn it much more quickly. Is there any source for this?
- freshhawk 6y ago
  Older children learn things faster than younger children, why would reading be an exception?
  - thotsBgone 6y ago
    This is not true for everything, like speaking. If you don't learn language in the critical period, you will never master it.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]

barry-cotter 6y ago

> to me, is fucking terrifying. Why? It takes 40 contact hours to teach a nine year old to read, according to John Taylor Gatto. You can teach all of primary school Math in the same time to a 12 year old. What’s the point of doing it earlier? There are little or no compounding gains from doing so. Countries that start teaching reading at 4 don’t do better than those that wait until 7. See France versus Germany or Finland. The entire point of the zone of proximal development is that you can spend weeks teaching something to a six year old that a nine year old will pick up in an afternoon because they’re just more developed.

hndamien 6y ago
I taught a 5 year old to read to a 15 year old level in 20 contact hours for reference. Still room for improvement qualitatively but I think an observing scientist would say that they can read well, but not smoothly like an adult.
- Foobar8568 6y ago
  My teacher daughter was shocked she could read at 5,diring our first meeting she asked us : "do you know she can read?" I replied, "yes I know", she followed up with a "like an adult" almost frightened haha. Well I did tell her that she could read and write, I guess she was used of parents bullshitting on their kids achievements. Remove a screen and a kid can have crazy skills. Screens are really the opium of the people.
  - marcus_holmes 6y ago
    I grew up before screens, and we didn't have crazy skills.
    - Foobar8568 6y ago
      TV has been there as a main parenting tool from at least the 80s. Unless your parents were mixing alcohol with your milk, you had better skills than this current era one.

MisterBastahrd 6y ago

I'm pretty sure that if local officials were aware of this, they'd straight up take the child out of the home in most US states.

petertodd 6y ago

>> He didn't even learn how to read until he was around 10. > to me, is fucking terrifying. I could barely read at age 10, and I was in public school! That's why my parents took me out and homeschooled me. Which fixed the problem in a few months with intensive one-on-one phonics from my mom that the school system just wasn't going to do.

rimliu 6y ago

> All of the people I know who did better on their own > than in a classroom were able to do so because they > could gobble up half a library in a weekend. Can confirm. Small rural school (primary and middle), half of the teachers were not specialists on the subjects they taught. We were supposed to be learning English from the grade 4, but we had a "proper" English teacher for a year and then were taught by people who knew no English themselves. But I read a lot and it helped. I managed to be among the best students onward: be it the secondary school or the university. My take is: good teachers can motivate and inspire you a lot, but bad teachers can be ignored and should not hinder your education. I agree with Mark Twain here: "I have never let my schooling interfere with my education".