(Letter to British Sunday newspaper, The Observer, Sunday November 25, 2007, concerning the proposed Conservative Party policy to mandate reading for children by the age of six.)
As an expatriate living in Los Angeles, and the father of a three-year-old boy, I am horrified by the Tory proposal to force-feed the ability to read to children by six.
We have chosen for our son the Waldorf (Steiner in Europe) philosophy of education, which places a high emphasis on extending childhood as long as possible.
Our son has loved books since he was a tiny baby. All it takes is for parents to read aloud to a child. At a month old, he was choosing to listen to the rhythms of the poems in Robert Louis Stevenson's, A Child's Garden of Verse, over other, more simplistic fare. Learning is natural.
If you excite a child's interest in the world around them, they will ask a million questions and want to learn. But standardised testing at six is a terrible, terrible idea, and speaks more of the paucity of our culture than a real desire to stimulate a child's excitement about the world.
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