Teach any set of facts to the child
It is easier to teach a one-year-old any set of facts than it is to teach a seven-year-old.
Do you have a favorite subject that you can present to a baby in an honest and factual way? Go ahead. He’ll learn it at a speed which will astonish you and he’ll learn it superbly.
Do you love ornithology, art history, water skiing, ancient history, running, photography?
All you have to do is to figure out how to present it in an honest and factual way and by three he’ll be an expert at it and he’ll love it.
By twenty-one he’ll be an authority on it or a champion in it, if that’s what he wants to be.
Present it an honest and factual
We encourage our children to be generalists and learn everything we can posibly offer them so they can do everything well.
Tiny kids learn facts at a tremendous rate which staggers the adult imagination.
Get him started and then step back.
If you teach a tiny kid the facts he will discover the rules that govern them.
It is a built-in function of the human brain.
To state it in a slightly different way; if you teach him the facts of a body of knowledge, he will discover the laws by which they operate.
A beautiful example of this exists in the mistakes that tiny children make in grammar. This apparent paradox was pointed out y the brilliant Russian author Kornei Chukovski in his book From Two to Five (University of California Press)
A threeyear-old looks out a window and says, “Here comes the mailer.”
“Who?” we ask.
“The mailer.”
We look out the window and see the mailman. We chuckle at the childish mistake and tell the child that he is not called the mailer but the mailman.
We then dismiss the matter. Suppose that insted we asked ourselves the question, “Where did the child get the word mailer?” Surely no adult taught him the word “mailer.”Then where did he get it?
I’ve been thinking about if for many years, and I am convinced that there is only one possiblity.
He have discovered the law of grammar
The thre-year-old must have reviewed the language to come to the conclusion that there are certain actions uch as run, hug, kiss, sail, paint and that if you put the sound “er” on the end of them they become names and you have “runner”, “hugger”, “kisser”, “sailor”, “painter”, and so on.
That’s a whale of an accomplishment.
When did you last review a language to discover a law? May I suggest when you were three?
Still, we say it is mistake becaust he is not the “mailer”, he is the “mailman”,and so the child is wrong.
Wrong word, yes, but right law.
The child was quite correct about the law of grammar he had discovered. The problem is that English is irregular and thus does not always follow logical rules. If it were regular the three-year-old would have been right.
Marvelous.
- Glenn Doman
Tags: baby, brain, children, early learning, education, encyclopedic, flashcard, genius, kid, picture, reading, teaching, word
