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--is often met with 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. 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. 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 and repeat 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," 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."

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 commonly-seen logos and street signs, many early education experts say--it is amusing and heartening in its own way, but it is not really reading. Indeed, two of most commonly used early reading tools, Doman's book How to Teach Your Baby to Read and Robert Titzer's video series Your Baby Can Read, do not recommend or use systematic phonics.

Titzer, who has a Ph.D. in Human Performance from Indiana University, claims that children from three months to five years or so are in the prime period for language learning of all sorts--including written language--and they can much more easily pick up phonetic patterns from examples than can older children. On this view, simply by seeing how a wide enough variety of words are spelled, children just naturally infer the common phonetic rules, such as the "silent e" rule. This is similar to the common tenet of the "whole language" philosophy of education, according to which (older) children infer the phonetic rules "implicitly." There is not yet any body of research, however, that indicates that small children can learn phonics implicitly in this way.

Even if some sort of reading can be taught at a very early age, there are some experts who say we should not try. See below for more (forthcoming).

In sum, it is a startling fact, for many, that babies without any particularly high intellectual ability can be taught to pronounce words from writing. Whether this deserves to be called "reading" is a question that many experts are willing to dispute. In any event, by the age of 2 or 3, there are many toddlers, who started learning to "read" earlier, who exhibit every sign of reading, and who, for example, test at a U.S. first or second grade reading level.

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, and while there are many variations, they tend to involve showing the child the word, in very large print, followed by a picture of the thing that the word describes. For example, you show a child the word "dog," followed by a picture of a dog. If this is repeated often enough, the child learns the shape of the word and can repeat the word out loud (if she can pronounce the phonemes of the word yet).