Accelerated early childhood education
Accelerated early childhood education is an ad hoc description of a loose movement, and pedagogy, according to which infants and toddlers benefit greatly from systematic, "academic"-type learning far earlier than has normally been thought appropriate. While there is no generally accepted name for the movement, it has been in existence since at least the 1964 publication of Glenn Doman's How to Teach Your Baby to Read. Doman and those who followed in his footsteps are in no small part responsible for the proliferation of educational videos aimed at infants and toddlers, such as "Baby Einstein." There has since been a backlash against the movement and these products, with critics accusing parents of wishful thinking and suppliers of products as profiteering.
Can babies be taught to read?
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A good place to begin a discussion of accelerated early childhood education is with very early reading.
The notion that babies and small toddlers can be taught to read--after a fashion, at least--often provokes disbelief and astonishment. But it is well-known and easy to demonstrate that children as young as one year old can learn to say printed words out loud. Consider the YouTube video at right. In it, the child is presented with a number of pages with words written on them, such as "ball," "banana," "no," and with no other clues. The child has no trouble saying the word written on the card. Dozens of similar videos on YouTube and other websites demonstrate the same thing.[1] Note that this is a different sort of case from those in which gifted children simply "pick up" the ability to read, without any explicit instruction.[2] Rather, the child has been deliberately taught to memorize the words.
Early childhood development experts and educationists have known for a long time that it is indeed possible to teach tiny children to memorize words in this way, but are not very impressed. Many of them deny that it is really reading. The children are not getting meaning from text, they say. These children are, instead, merely "barking at print,"[3] or in other words, merely memorizing the overall shape of a word and associating it with the sound of the word. Still, it is very likely that many reading one-year-olds have a passable understanding of words like "dog" and "cat" that they can pronounce off the page. Indeed, children as early as nine months appear to show that they understand to some extent, by for example pointing to their heads when they see the word "head."[4]
Another common professional reaction to infant reading is to observe that the children are, after all, merely repeating words they have memorized, and they cannot really be said to be reading until they can sound out new words they have seen before. Merely memorizing a lot of words is like memorizing the commonly-seen logos and street signs--it is amusing and heartening in its own way, but it is not reading.
How are babies taught to read?
How are babies taught to "read" in this way? There are an increasing number of "teach your baby to read" products available.
References
- ↑ See the results of this YouTube search as well as the "video testimonials" on this website (the testimonials are for a video series titled "Your Baby Can Read").
- ↑ An example of the latter type of early reading can be seen in this video and this video, in which the baby girl of a pair of speech pathologists can be found to read never-before-seen words with amazing facility. Her parents did teach her to sign, which no doubt increased the girl's facility with other modes of language.
- ↑ "Barking at print" is the phrase used by whole language advocates to describe what children do who have learned how to sound out words phonetically, without knowing what they mean. But it is pressed into service here as well, even though the children are not usually sounding words out.
- ↑ This is what Robert Titzer shows his nine-month-old daughter Aleka doing in a video on this page.