Hey man Pete, don't start swapping anecdotes with me on that topic!!! I could bore the trunk off an elephant. You think YOU have problems in the UK? In SA the wrong elements had got control of the educational system, Piaget zealots who forbade any child younger than 6 going to school because they could not be "school ready", never mind "reading ready" or "counting ready". Piaget had proved it, see? And there was some kind of (can't quite remember... "Christian-National" principle of education...?)
It was a matter of doctrine, of dogma, of resistance to heresy you see? It was not illegal to send children to pre-school creches, but if these were to receive state subsidiesm which most of them could not survivie without, they were not allowed even to have letters or numbers displayed on the walls.
Our younger son went to such a preschool creche. So one day when he is at university, he and my wife met a young lady who says to him "do you remember me?" No, sorry.
It turns out that she was in that creche with him. One day the teacher tells them all to occupy themselves quietly while she goes to a meeting. Our son goes to the reading corner, sees a book, sits down and starts reading, as he might at home. This young lady goes up to him and asks: "What are you doing?" "Reading." "Could you read to me." "Certainly."
When the teacher returns she finds the class quiet as mice listening to David reading to them. You would think that she would have thought that coming back to a spontaneously dead silent class after a prolonged absence, she had died and gone to heaven, but no, apparently all she thought of was lost subsidies; she shrieked, snatched the book, and screamed that he was never to go near the reading corner again. Well okay, if you say so, the books weren't up to much of an intellectual standard anyway, but...?
Well of course we never knew of that, not until his erstwhile classmate told us this perhaps 14 years later.But you see, just a couple of years before, we had been in England for two years, and there you could send them to school much younger than in South Africa. For us it was a frustrating step down!
Oh well, we were warned that teaching them to read young would cause horrible problems, but that one was probably the worst. So much for Piaget.
OK, so we had bright sons, but Doman reckons that teaching preschoolers works well for children of all standards who do not happen to have particular problems, and I find that believable.
