LD Resources

Ugh.

Haven’t we learned yet? Children are growing up with too much pressure to conform and to achieve in a way that minimizes the need for play, robust and creative physical activity, imaginative thinking and oral language development. Early emphasis on drill and rote memorization of facts has not proven to produce long term results. Instead, it leads to too many instances of budding anxiety and the skipping of developmental stages.

If you roboticize a child to where they can recite and count to 100 at the age of 3, without developing a sense of numbers (like corresponding the word 25 to the right number of real objects), you’ve accomplished little.

A quote from this article in the Seattle Times, which in part, targets programs like Kumon: “The best you can say is that they’re useless,” said Alison Gopnik, a professor of psychology at the University of California, Berkeley, who compared the escalation of supplemental education with Irish elk competing to see which had the biggest antlers. “The result is that they go around tottering, unable to walk, under the enormous weight of these antlers they’ve developed,” she said. “I think it’s true of American parents from high school all the way down to preschool.”