The e-mailed report card from my daughter-inlaw about my grandtwins' first day at their new school was encouraging.
Gucci Bags Replica"They just LOVE their new school," she wrote. Both of them are getting along well with their classmates and they're taking classes in art, music, computers and sign language.
"Can't believe they'll be 5 next month," she concluded.
I am, of course, delighted that the kids LOVE their school, but it certainly shows how out of touch I am with modern education. Because I had no idea schools were teaching the intricacies of computers to children who may not yet have mastered the complexities of tying their own shoes. Or that sign languages classes were available to kids who only recently had begun to vocalize entire sentences.
Perhaps it's only that way in their upscale suburb of Washington, D.C., one in which no conscientious parent waits until kindergarten to begin their child's formal education. Instead of fables and fairy tales, these kids of politicians and lawyers probably are reading the newspaper columns of George Will and Paul Krugman. Tuning out cartoons and tuning in C-Span.
But my guess is that children going straight from high chairs to high tech has become common in every American city where competitive parenting is practiced. Cities where Paper Bag Printing kids who aren't registered for the best schools on their way home from the birthing center are hopelessly behind and doomed to failure. Preschool is too late. Now it's prenatal school. Mozart in the womb.
Early education no longer means teaching a 4-year old ABCs and counting to 10. It means 1-yearolds absorbing Baby Einstein, Baby Beethoven and Brainy Baby, even though some studies indicate that the hours toddlers spend in their play pens watching these videos actually delay their language development.
I don't know when this rush to education began. If I had to guess, I'd say it may have been born during my generation of scholastic slackers, when our tranquil tradition of under-education was disrupted by a news bulletin that the Russians had launched their first satellite. Before Sputnik had completed its first orbit, our elders were demanding that we quit wasting our time reading "The Catcher in the Rye" and start getting serious about math and science, because the Commies were about to rule the world.
Or maybe it was a later generation, when someone warned that Japan was poised to dominate the economic world because Japanese schoolchildren were intently studying seven days a week while American kids were idling away their weekends playing hopscotch.
Both predictions turned out to be wrong, of course. Still, there's probably no such thing as a too-early education. So I'm glad my grandtwins love their new school and are able to take advantage of the opportunities it offers.
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Besides, with the way my hearing is deteriorating, sign language may soon be the only way my grandkids have to wheedle me into taking them to the zoo.
And when they come to our house to visit this Thanksgiving, they'll be able to show me how to finally access wi-fi on the PC we bought two years ago.
Contact D.L. Stewart at dlstew_ .
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