Hi Amalie,
Amalie, this is just my reflections on my personal experience. I hope it might interesting in some way!
Mandabplus, it seems your family probably did something right on the socialization front! Do you have any favorite ideas on socialization education for EL kids in non-EL school-age environments?
First, let me poke some holes in the Psych Today articles!
The first article talks about preschools. While adapting EL to a preschool class presents interesting technical questions, the tried-and-true EL method is a caregiver and a child one-on-one. There are millions of great ways to extend that, but the one-on-one is the core system. So even if a bunch of particular preschool systems failed in their research, I would blame those particular preschool systems, not EL in general. The second article compares alternative education methods that do better or worse, all of them starting off at 4 y/o or older, and all of them based in classroom-settings.
So, I feel like neither of these articles really engages with the core EL techniques. But I will continue to play the "devil's advocate" to try to answer your question. Let me use myself as a case example to identify three possible NEGATIVE mechanisms that can perhaps explain the lack of EL-generated Albert Einstein's and Ada Lovelace's.
Note that my parents raised me with EL (Doman) flashcards etc, starting when I was 2 y/o. Now I'm 30, and my wife and I are expecting (due in 1 wk). We're getting ready to implement EL ourselves, so if anything I'm biased in favor of EL. But here's the negative:
As Amalie notes, I suppose that attempts at EL play that aren't kept joyous and fun could have negative consequences. That's certainly one to watch out for. I didn't experience this until 6 or 7 years old, but I had some moderately negative experiences at those ages. My mother pushed me to complete Kumon assignments and piano practice by taking away my stuff and freedoms etc. While I still enjoy and am "good" at music and math today, those things never became a big passion for me. But maybe those "negative" experiences were also an important part of learning some aspect of discipline - hard for me to really know.
Mandabplus mentions a second negative mechanism in laziness learned from a boring school. If a child benefits enormously from EL, but then enters a schooling environment with few intellectual challenges for an entire decade, this could result in a habit of laziness that could eventually overshadow the initial EL head start. I definitely experienced this as well. While EL helped me succeed despite learned-laziness in academically competitive highschools, I was scrambling to learn study habits in 10th grade. I was still scrambling to learn legible note-taking habits at the age of 27 in Economics grad school. (Note that I still credit EL with my facility with reading and math, giving me test scores and writing ability to get accepted into grad schools, etc.)
But there is also a third, social, mechanism that I would like to mention.
In my experience, grade school from K to 12 was a messy social environment. Bullies aren't the half of it! I was probably a 'academic bully' myself, raising my hand at every opportunity, immediately and visibly reacting to incorrect answers from other students, etc. (I had a competitive environment at home, with a brother just 1.5 years older.) As a result, bullying wasn't necessary in my case: I achieved pariahship by consensus!
But, the story has a happy ending. In his late 30s, my father began retooling his career from engineering toward moving into middle-management. My love for reading, received from EL, enabled me to read his burgeoning library of leadership/pop-psychology/self-help books on my own motivation. From 8th grade through 10th grade, I read and experimented with the suggestions of Dale Carnegie, Donald Laird, Daniel Goleman, etc. Then, when we moved to Pittsburgh for my junior year of highschool, I soon found myself reasonably socially successful. If anything, perhaps I was too much of a social butterfly!
I think that a parallel education in diplomacy may be useful, to balance and ballast the intellectual acceleration of EL. In some families, teaching this to kids might be so natural that the parents may take it for granted. Children in other families might benefit from an explicit focus on learning "emotional intelligence" alongside intellectual pursuits. Of course pop-psych is probably an imperfect source for this - faith traditions or other philosophy could offer a richer body of material. My wife and I certainly plan to place social and moral competencies explicitly at the center of our learning curriculum.
In summary of the social mechanism, I entered the schoolyard benefiting from an extensive EL curriculum, but without diplomacy training. I had very different habits, and a very different mental toolbox than the roomful of non-EL second-graders. It may have almost been like being a different ethnicity, with distinct accent markers. The difficulties entailed by "difference without diplomacy," may offer a third mechanism predicting difficulties faced by EL kids.
Finally, let me link to an alternate explanation for the EL naysayers's persistence: "regret-aversion".
http://forum.brillkids.com/general-discussion-b5/manifesto-of-very-early-education-(version-1)/msg94369/#msg94369Cheers,
Steven
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