Is early academic learning for children safe?

What is the risk of a child's early education and whether it can inhibit his intellectual development

There are well-known studies, the results of which clearly confirm the opinion that early academic training can cause long-term damage to a child. This is what will be discussed in this article, as well as what can actually happen to children. To begin with, it is necessary to separate for yourself such concepts as academic and intellectual skills.

What is the difference between academic and intellectual skills, and why should the latter necessarily precede the former?

Academic skills in general are a proven means of organizing, manipulating or responding to certain categories of information in order to achieve a desired result. When talking about reading, academic skills mean the ability to name the letters of the alphabet and pronounce the sounds that each of these letters represents, to read aloud words, including new ones, to consider the combination of certain letters and sounds. When talking about mathematics, academic skills mean the ability to memorize the multiplication table, add, subtract, multiply or divide numbers using learned methods or algorithms.

Academic skills are taught in school through methods such as demonstration, play-aloud, memorization, memorization and repetition. Such skills are later tested, in which each question usually has one correct answer.

Intellectual skills, on the other hand, involve a person's ability to reason, speculate, hypothesize, research, understand meaning, and make sense of the world as a whole. Every child is an intellectual being by nature - an inquisitive person who is constantly in search of the meaning of existence, seeks to understand his physical and social environment. Each child is born with intellectual skills and develops them further in his own ways and ways, observing, exploring, playing and asking adults various questions.

Attempts to directly teach intellectual skills are doomed in advance, because each child must develop them in his own individual way, with the help of his personal self-initiated activity. However, adults are able to influence such development with the help of the environment surrounding the baby. Children who grow up in an atmosphere of comprehensive development and education, where they love to read and understand the exact sciences (when a child is read to from childhood and she herself sees family members who constantly read, play games related to numbers and arithmetic at home , use various measuring devices, so that the baby has the opportunity to get acquainted with the concept of measure) - in such an environment, children acquire their own and unique understanding of the meaning, tasks and importance of reading and counting.

So, let's get to the point. Teaching academic skills to children who have not yet developed the necessary motivational and intellectual foundations is a waste of time and often harmful. Children who have not yet found the meaning of reading (a reason to read) for themselves or have not realized its importance will have little motivation to learn academic reading skills, and their insufficient understanding will be observed. Similarly, children who have not yet developed an understanding of numbers and why and what they are useful for may learn the order of, say, addition, but the procedure will have little or no meaning for them.

Acquiring academic skills without an appropriate intellectual foundation will be unequivocally shallow and superficial. As a rule, when the "drill" stops, for example, during the summer vacation, the skills are quickly forgotten. This is the so-called "summer slide" of academic ability, which some educators try to level by keeping children in school all year! We must not forget that our brain is designed to select what we understand and reject what is superfluous and unnecessary.

Moreover, when procedures are learned mechanically, especially if the learning is slow and painful, or even shame-induced, as is often the case, by coercion and forcing, such learning can disrupt the intellectual development necessary to acquire the skills of real reading or doing real mathematics.

Mechanically trained, exhausted children may lose all desire to independently play and explore the literary and numerical world, and thus stop developing the important intellectual foundation for real reading or math. This explains why researchers repeatedly find that the results of academic studies that begin in kindergarten are poor or definitely not the best on tests in high school. Therefore, many organizations that protect the interests of children strongly oppose the widespread trend of teaching academic skills to children who are still young. The first years (especially!) should be fun, in play, in an atmosphere of enthusiastic research and development of an intellectual foundation, which will later allow children to acquire academic skills quite easily.

Thus, the idea that early academic learning can be harmful is supported by many researchers, as well as the idea that academic learning will be easy and effortless if only the child has acquired the necessary intellectual foundation and already wants to master academic skills, that is, the child is motivated to gain knowledge. A motivated and intellectually prepared child is capable of deep and long-term assimilation of even the most complex information.