Why not put your kids in Chinese play school.

There is a lot of parental pressure on kids to achieve these days. In Asia parents put their kids into English play school and in the US I hear of parents wanting to put their kids into Chinese play school, all in the name of giving them some advantage. Now I am all for language learning, but is it really necessary? Don't little kids just want to play with their friends?  They are learning all the time, and it is not like they are going to miss the boat.

I just returned from Sweden. I have two employees there who have young school age children. They are quite frustrated at the fact that in Sweden they do not start teaching reading until the age of seven. The same is true in Finland. Yet Finland consistently scores at the very top in international comparison of 15 year olds in reading and math. Chinese kids study 1200 hours a year and Finnish kids only 800 hours per year and do just as well or better. And the Finnish kids get very little homework. Of course, that Chinese number does not take into consideration the additional hours of "cram school" which is an East Asian tradition. The Finns also learn to speak Swedish and English.

Could it be that hours of schooling do not matter very much, that hours of homework do not matter very much? Apparently Finnish teachers are very well paid. I do not know, but it seems to me that fewer, better paid, motivated and respected teachers, and fewer hours of instruction, and more room for reading and learning, will lead to better results.

I mean it is clear to me that very little learning takes place in Canadian language classes. Can this problem be more wide spread?

I will be talking in other posts about the fascinating book I read in Germany about how the brain learns. I am not sure that our teaching system takes into account what we have learned about the brain in the last few years.

Meanwhile let's give the kids a break. Let's inspire them rather than drill them or pressure them.

Comments

[mike]

Steve, I think the ranking you give for Finland might be a case of bait-and-switch.

According to the Wikepedia article on education in Finland "In particular, an important difference compared with other systems is that there is no common "youth school" — ages 15-19 are spent either in a trade school, or in an academic-oriented upper secondary school."

I'm just taking a stab at this, but I suspect the kids taking the test are the ones in the academic-oriented schools. So, sure, screen out the bottom performers and your average is going to look pretty good!

[Ana]

I totally agree with you! This ever increasing pressure on kids happens in Brazil too. The teacher of my twins complained the entire year that my 5 year old girl was having trouble in learning to read. Or more specifically, she can read, but have trouble writing. We asked her doctor what to do, and she told us that this is a commom complaint, because schools are forcing young kids to do things which they are not physically prepared for.
This is sad. I believe a 5-year-old child should be mostly playing, but it is almost impossible to find a school that agrees with this. Officially, the age of learning to read and write is 6, but most schools are trying to make them to read a year before, to show to the anxious parents that they are "strong" schools...

[Steve Kaufmann]

Mike,
The students measured were 15 years old. Finland does not stream students up to that point, unlike some other countries. No, their results are real.

[Ed]

I agree. The teaching profession in N America is not valued. I believe there is a tendency to see it as primarily a mentoring and socialization service and only secondarily as a teaching service. Unfortunately I think it is a realistic assessment.

The following article

http://www.news.com.au/story/0,23599,21766478-421,00.html

reports on a study that suggests what most people already know in their heart: that there is such a thing as a good teacher and these teachers' students consistently perform better than other teachers' students. Professional teaching related bodies tend to think it "unprofessional" to discriminate based on such criteria. This is to the disservice of the profession and ultimately to kids.

[chris(mandarin_student)]

Agreed Steve, the pressure to educate early and cram information results in a pressure to measure the success of this and because it is easier to measure facts than understanding the assessment process gets more and more divorced from the real world.

For example in Maths a reflex angle is defined as "An angle greater than 180° and less than 360°" A child knowing this is fairly irrelevant though because the important thing is the ability to work with and understand angles, knowing all the nomenclature and a few simple stock formulae is of course a lot easier to test, it also requires less effort (in theory) because you can load (or overload) a child with a whole bunch of facts to learn and leave them to get on with it to a large extent.

[Mohamed Idris]

I think children should not be pressured in the name of preparing them for the future. This is especially true for language. Children should focus on their native language first and learn to read and write in it well. Then when they are old enough, they should also be taught a course on language awareness, whereby they can get some background information on language in general and on the different languages of the world. Only after that can they make informed decisions regarding which language they should learn. In this way they can satisfactorily answer anyone who asks them why they are learning this or that language.

[Steve Kaufmann]

I agree Mohamed. On the other hand I see nothing wrong in exposing children to different languages when they are young. I would do this through stories, to listen to and read. I believe that with a "junior version" of LingQ children under 10 could enjoy exploring different languages and their brains can get used to the idea that different languages have different sounds and different ways of saying things and are vehicles for different cultures. There should be no pressure or expectation of the children in terms of producing the language. They should just be given the opportunity to explore. I think this would be beneficial if they eventually decided to learn other languages. Children naturally want to learn and explore. So do we all, as long as school does not demotivate us.

[Nicole]

Hi Steve, could you please elaborate on the subject of Junior LingQ? I have seen a few ideas on the LingQ forum, but I would really like to know if there is a dream / wish version of it somewhere in the back of your mind. As you know I am trying to write items in Dutch for LingQ and I would like to start writing items for children as well. I was thinking along the lines of tales with many pictures and few words, if there would be a possibility to have more than one picture in an item in time. Or simply stories in basic vocabulary with children as the lead characters? There could also be songs for really young children, much like they would learn in kindergarten.
I'd love to read what you think.

[Steve Kaufmann]

Nicole, you know how busy we are now at LIngQ. I have no immediate plans to create a Junior LingQ. It would probably take Mike one week to accommodate larger font and accept multiple pictures and other child oriented decoration on our page. At that time we may alter the interface to make it more child friendly, and have some other special effects for children, like a happy sound when they LingQ etc. So we are not about to do this.

In the meantime nothing prevents you from creating and uploading content of interest to children, with easier words and even songs. The main activity remains listening on an iPod.