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DadDude
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« Reply #8 on: April 05, 2010, 05:26:40 AM » |
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Very interesting video. I would love to a story about these kids in, say, five years. And I hate to sound like a broken record, but I wish they'd put their money into a study of the efficacy of Doman's methods.
Watching the clips of the kids saying what's on the cards, the same reaction that many have to Doman occurred to me: that's very nice, but the real question is whether knowing all those facts will greatly improve the future abilities of the children to learn. Now, don't get me wrong. As long as they stay at least as enthusiastic about learning as they otherwise would, knowing these facts benefits them. But the question is whether knowing those facts will greatly improve the future abilities of those children.
After all, that's the whole reason we get excited about all this, isn't it? Seeing a child do something or recite some fact very precociously is exciting entirely because this seems to indicate that the child is farther down the path to knowledge, or more intelligent, or better prepared to learn. Just think: if a person were stuck with the knowledge of the smartest five-year-old on Earth for the rest of his life, he would be an ignoramus as an adult--an idiot savant at best. Insofar as what we're caring about is knowledge, it's long-term knowledge that matters, it's how much knowledge the child will have when he or she is much older.
Some critics of Doman & similar programs sometimes write as if we did not realize these things. Well, I certainly do, and most of you probably do too. But I admit that, from where I sit, I merely have a reasonable belief--I do not know--that my boy's store of knowledge and critical-thinking abilities will be benefitted in the long term by the educational activities we undertake now. I really wish I had some empirical proof, one way or another, that these activities really would be beneficial or not. In the absence of such proof, the that seems dispositive to me are the many examples of children who are doing very well in school after receiving Doman training. Of course, there are also the sort of common sense argument that there is no good reason to think that advantages will be lost, if one is not pressuring a child in a way that makes him lose interest in learning.
I understand that there are many studies to the effect that trying to teach various skills "too early" gives only a small and temporary advantage. But my understanding is that such studies are mostly about older children (not the under-5 set), they do not involve teaching using Doman's (or Titzer's) methods, and they involve simply starting traditional academic work earlier. So the studies don't seem very relevant to what we're doing with our children.
Anyway, I am honest enough to admit that I don't know if we will, in the long run, have the same good results that some others report with their Doman-trained children. This is why careful scientific studies are so important.
Another thing occurs to me. I and many of us often say that the reason we pursue training our children using these methods is that we want the best for our children, we want to give them every benefit we can. I think this is a very reasonable and sincere sentiment, however our detractors may be skeptical about it. But think a little more about what this common statement means. We are saying that it is worth our time, and our children's, to give them what we hope will be a long-term advantage in terms of knowledge. And yet, how many of us parents care so much about our own levels of knowledge? How many of us are engaged in continuing education, or read many books that greatly expand our intellectual horizons? No offense, but I doubt it's very many; we're busy living our lives. For better or worse, for most people--even highly educated people--continuing education takes a back seat to other things (like work, and educating our own children).
For most of us, then, I think we're just interested in cramming in as much intellectual improvement into childhood as possible--and then what? What constitutes end-point success for a Doman parent? Being smart? Getting a professional job? Lots of non-Doman educated kids can achieve those things. Again, you might say, "It's just the comparative advantage, the benefit," but that doesn't answer the question: to what end does the benefit point?
There's nothing magic about knowing many facts, no ticker-tape parades for being able to do better than others on a standardized test, no deep satisfaction one gets from being "on top." There is nothing like a "genius" of the sort that Doman himself seems to envision, a young person whose intelligence is so brilliant that it is magical and outshines that of us mere mortals. Creating a "genius" is not the answer.
My own answer is based on my notion of what it means to be well-educated. This notion involves having substantial knowledge about many different subjects, being able to write well, being able to read difficult texts, being comfortable with numbers (or excellent, if one is in a technical field), being able to speak a few languages, and generally having a sophisticated outlook on human life and our place in the universe. In short I have the traditional aim of a deep, serious liberal arts education. But I think that I personally didn't really get as good an education, along those lines, as I could have, at least not by the time I graduated from high school. I could have learned so much more than I did. I still have things to learn that I think I should have learned in junior high or high school. My own educational failures and observing those of so many people around me has made me very much aware that, with the explosion of knowledge and all the distractions of modern life, it is actually very difficult to obtain a very good liberal arts education. You get it only deliberately and through hard work and good preparation.
I think that starting early and giving a child the conceptual background and the taste for knowledge from an early age (which learning to read early can probably help), you are making it more likely that a child will be able to obtain a serious, solid liberal arts education. The child will be able to, and hopefully will actually, read more of the classics; understand, appreciate, and actually read history; get farther along in math (and actually understand it); and so forth.
But if you did not have the goal of a liberal arts education, I frankly don't know what the rush would be, unless you had the notion, again, that simply "being ahead" was desirable for its own sake. So you've "won the race" if you graduate from high school at age 12. Well, I guess you can start earning big money sooner, which might mean that you will have a longer career and end up in life richer...so?
My notion though is that by starting early, this gives the child the opportunity to fill up those teenage years with more general knowledge, more literature and history, a deeper grounding in science, and so forth--before having finally to specialize and get into a profession.
There's almost nothing better in life, in my opinion, than improving the mind with knowledge. The times in high school and college when I was really learning were, I think, some of the happiest times in my life. So "starting early" really has little more purpose than to improve the chances that my child will enjoy that sort of learning more, in the long run. That's why I'm doing this.
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