Quick question for my European readers...

[rivka]

...is this person smoking crack, or what?

While I agree with the general consensus that it's a bad idea to push your kids too much, I have to say that when when I was in preschool (in Europe) we all had to learn how to read, write, learn multiplication tables, long division, addition, subtraction, inequalities, a foreign language, AND we played a lot.

It was pretty much the norm to know how to read and to have basic arithmetic skills *long* before you entered elementary school, and we never felt like we weren't having fun.

So if I had a choice, yes, I'd definitely want to send my kids to that kind of a preschool. It's not about being ahead of everyone else (because, like I said, in my case, I was just average when I could read when I was three). It's about the fact that no one can learn like a child can, and you only have a certain number of years before your brain starts turning into mush. Why waste those years with nothing but play?

Is it really "just average" for Europeans to be reading at three, and doing long division before the age of five? I've always been under the impression that Europeans are more likely to have a "let children be children" philosophy than Americans, but I'll admit that I don't have much to base that impression on, besides the big progressive educational philosophies (Montessori, Waldorf, Reggio Emiliana) all being European in origin.

(Obviously, I'm not going to run out and buy a lot of flash cards if she turns out to be correct. I'm just curious.)

NB: I don't think we're talking about a radical cultural disconnect about which ages constitute "preschool," because this is someone who now lives in the United States. She never specified where in Europe she is from; she included all Europeans in this comment and her further elaborations upon it.

Comments

[not-a-number.livejournal.com]

I guess it kind-of applies to the former USSR. I grew up at Ukraine (Born 1985), started reading at the age of three years, nine months and 14 days (Mom kept a diary with amusing quotes and developments), but that was probably home schooling and not kindergarten education. What I do know, is that when I went to the first grade, I was expected to know how to read but not how to write, and as far as math - I think we skimmed past addition, subtraction, multiplication, simple division and probably even multiplication table in two months or so because almost everybody knew it. I do remember handling square roots and powers at the end of the 1st - beginning of the second grade.

When I immigrated to Israel after being 2.5 years in Ukrainian school, I knew all of the math material up to the end of 6th grade of Israeli school.

On the other hand, nowadays I hate math. Maybe it has something to do with a math overdose during grade school.

[rivka.livejournal.com]

Thanks for weighing in! That's really interesting. Were you equally ahead of other Israeli students in other fields, or was it primarily the math?

On the other hand, nowadays I hate math. Maybe it has something to do with a math overdose during grade school.

Hee! Maybe so. I've seen some research suggesting that children who get a lot of early drill and memorization do much better than their peers at first, but even out or even fall behind later on - possibly because of fatigue or burnout. I don't think it's been very well-studied, though.

[lerryn.livejournal.com]

Now that might be the case, but I ended up burned out on math around 19 or 20 trying to do differential equations. Not sure if it was brain overload or the fact that I had a year-long break from math as a senior in high school after I exhausted all available coursework at my school as a junior.

[not-a-number.livejournal.com]

I distinctly remember being better at math, English, science and geography (Russian too, but that's kind of irrelevant :) ). Apart from that, I was gradually introduced into the class over the course of quite a few months because I had Hebrew language lessons during school hours, so maybe I leveled-up or forgot some of the previous knowledge during that time.