> If your kid learns the alphabet at 4 or at 8, what's the difference?
It might make a big difference to the individual kid. One of my earliest memories is seeing how adults read words and numbers, I must have been between 4 and 5 years old. I asked my parents to show me how to do that and they replied "no, you'll learn this when you're older, this is not for you." Later in first grade, learning to read and write was no fun at all (I blame the teacher), and guess what: a good number of kids could already do it. Where would the harm have been in taking a few hours to teach me that stuff a couple of years earlier, when I first wanted to?
This anecdote is about learning things early, but overall I agree with you that learning stuff gets massively easier at a later age. I never really understood math and physics until I was in my twenties and had the opportunity to explore the subjects on my own terms.
I think the point here is to teach when the student is ready and homeschooling allows the parents to do that. The issue was that your parents didn't teach you when you were ready. The original poster meant that if a child was not ready to learn to read until age 8 that would be OK, not to force them to delay learning until a specific age.
What if the student is never "ready" though? As part of a project for a small Christian liberal arts college, I had access to anonymized data on admissions and class schedules. They accepted a great deal of homeschooled students. Can you guess what how many of them placed in remedial math classes?
Many times more than their traditionally educated counterparts. The school was not big, these catch-up classes were full of kids home schooled by well meaning parents who never thought their kids were "ready" for basic mathematics. This is a colossal failure, when you get to college without knowing basic math, entire departments are simply closed to you.
Interestingly, they often placed in line with their peers in language, with many placing highly in foreign languages as well. Maybe that says something about the priorities of the average parent of a homeschooler?
What grades are you talking about? There was a very large experiment done over 80 years ago that showed kids who weren't taught arithmetic until 6th grade did just as well as their peers after just a year of instruction. They even performed better than their peers on word problems.
Math is hard. Language is clearly one of humans inherent evolutionary talents. Children soak up languages at an unbelievable rate. Heck, most adults when faced with full immersion in another language can get pretty far. We are built to do language as much as we are built to walk on 2 legs.
Math, math seems more like a side effect of our big old brains. Math can be learned, but it fades quickly. We are able to do it, but we aren't really built to do it.
Anyway, i guess i'm arguing language is hard to screw up.
The other issue is severely mentally deficient students. Maybe I am just from an inbred, hillbilly part of the the country, but I had a number of students in my classes going through school that probably couldn't crack 75 on an IQ test. And I'm not counting the students that were in the severe and profound program, for the retarded and Downs Syndrome.
It's a huge disservice to lump these students in with the others. The students that can actually do the work get held back (and I'm not talking about the high-level students, (who are usually brutally retarded in their development, unless they take matters into their own hands), this impacts the mediocre students as well).
Yes, I thought I addressed that as well, sorry if I wasn't clear enough. I agree that the lesson here is that it goes both ways as far as timing and learning are concerned.
It might make a big difference to the individual kid. One of my earliest memories is seeing how adults read words and numbers, I must have been between 4 and 5 years old. I asked my parents to show me how to do that and they replied "no, you'll learn this when you're older, this is not for you." Later in first grade, learning to read and write was no fun at all (I blame the teacher), and guess what: a good number of kids could already do it. Where would the harm have been in taking a few hours to teach me that stuff a couple of years earlier, when I first wanted to?
This anecdote is about learning things early, but overall I agree with you that learning stuff gets massively easier at a later age. I never really understood math and physics until I was in my twenties and had the opportunity to explore the subjects on my own terms.