"Teaching is pointless"

Kathy Hirsh-Pasek and Roberta Michnick Golinkoff: Early exposure to classical music does not make your brain grow in ways that make you smarter.

BrillBaby: True – the "Mozart effect" has been basically debunked. What happened was that a group of researchers discovered in 1993 that listening to Mozart could induce a short-term improvement in subjects' spatial reasoning skills. The media jumped on this, and the myth that "Mozart makes you smarter" was born. Manufacturers in turn jumped on exaggerated reports appearing in the media to produce "educational" music CDs for infants.

But does this mean that there is nothing to be said for a musical education? Far from it. It's just that classical music doesn't have a monopoly on making smart babies.

The effects of music on the brain are profound. For a start, just listening to music stimulates several areas of the brain at once – in ways that are only just being revealed. It is only in the last 10 years that scientists have discovered that the cerebellum – once believed to be solely responsible for controlling motor skills – is involved in music interpretation.

That we decipher music primarily with the right hemisphere of the brain is well known. However, scientists have recently discovered that musically experienced individuals use more of their left brain – i.e. take a more analytical approach to dissecting music – than musically inexperienced individuals. When listening to music, people who received musical training early in life also show a greater area of brain activity than do non-musicians.

According to Josef Rauschecker, a researcher at Georgetown University, "Music is processed in more regions of the brain than we ever imagined." He adds, "Musicians devote more brain power to listening to music and may have better abilities in other areas as well."

Musicians train their "ear" (by which we really mean that they train the auditory center of their brain) – but that's only half the story. Learning and regularly practicing a musical instrument have profound physical effects on the architecture of the brain. And the sculpting effect is most profound in musicians who began their training in early childhood.

Explains Gottfried Schlaug of Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston, "There are quite striking structural differences in the brains of professional musicians compared to non-musicians. For example, we have found that musicians have a larger than average corpus callosum [a fiber bundle connecting the left and right hemisphere of the brain], which may result in enhanced communication between the two halves of the brain. Furthermore, brain regions responsible for movement planning and movement execution as well as brain regions responsible for hearing were found to be larger in musicians compared with matched non-musician controls."

"Teaching is pointless"

KH-P + RMG: [Whole word reading] is simply memorization and has little merit beyond the performance.

BB: The authors draw the above conclusion after describing a scene in which a toddler who can read is brought by his mother to see the neighborhood psychologist (and one of the authors), Kathy Hirsh-Pasek. The child reads a set of words shown to him by his mother, but when Hirsh-Pasek asks him to read some different words, he becomes flustered and flees. Conclude the authors, "He had learned how to memorize words, perhaps from their shape… but he had not really learned to read."

Critics of early reading tend to pit whole word reading ("bad") against phonics-based reading ("good"). Hearing their arguments, you would be forgiven for thinking it's a case of either-or. In reality, almost all children learn to read by a combination of the whole word and phonics-based approaches. Whole word reading is easier, so most children learn their first words by this method, before they know the sounds that the letters make. Many kindergarten and lower-grade-school teachers teach some words by sight before starting on phonics.

If children begin reading by the whole word method at what is considered a normal age, no one criticizes them. But some people find it unsettling, even "wrong," for a very young child to be reading – and so they attack the method in order to prove that the child isn't "really" reading.

Whole word reading is just the first rung on the ladder of learning to read – as we can see from an analogy drawn by another critic of early learning, David Elkind. Elkind compares reading whole words to understanding the concept of nominal numbers (numbers as names) – which is the first rung of the ladder in learning math. Likewise, he compares reading phonetically (sounding out words) to understanding the concept of ordinal numbers (numbers as part of a sequence), and reading phonemically (recognizing that letters can be pronounced differently depending on context) to understanding the concept of interval numbers (numbers as abstract concepts, divorced from particular objects).

There comes a point at which reading cannot progress any further without phonics – because there are just too many words to rely on memory alone. Children must move on to phonetic reading followed by phonemic reading in order to become successful readers. But just as we do not criticize a child who reads phonetically but has not graduated to the phonemic level, it seems uncharitable, to say the least, to pour scorn on the abilities of a toddler who simply has not graduated from whole word reading to phonetic reading. (Aren't the critics of early learning always telling us that education isn't a race?)

Amazingly, babies taught to read using the whole word method usually begin figuring out the rules of phonics for themselves – just as babies learning their native language figure out the rules of grammar without being taught them. At the same time, to facilitate the process, we recommend teaching children phonics as soon as they are ready to start reading books.

Some critics of early reading worry that children taught by the whole word method will not know to read a word from left to right. However, both Robert Titzer's Your Baby Can Read! DVDs and the Little Reader software include a directional arrow to teach just this. In addition, we recommend pointing to every syllable of every word in the books you read to your child. Teaching the direction of reading in this way greatly assists children in deducing some basic rules of phonics.

"Teaching is pointless"

KH-P + RMG: A number of studies indicate that children who have been taught to memorize printed words might be ahead in first grade, but by third and fourth grades many of the other children have caught up or even surpassed them.

BB: According to recent scientific research, there are measurable long-term benefits to learning to read early in life. In "An illustrative case study of precocious reading ability," published in 2004 in Gifted Child Quarterly, authors Rhona Stainthorp and Diana Hughes compared the progress in school of children who began reading early with children who began reading at an average age. According to their report, "The differences between [the early readers'] skills and those of the regular readers did not level out but continued to increase." This in turn created "an upward spiral in reading and [language acquisition] and a secondary impact on other subjects." Conclude the authors, "The study shows that the early readers and especially the precocious reader not only continue to hold their advantage in reading skills, but improve at an increasingly fast rate when provided appropriate interventions."

In fact, we have known for decades that learning to read early confers significant long-term advantages. In longitudinal studies conducted in the US in the 1960s and 70s by Dolores Durkin, it was found that, eight years on, children who had been taught to read at age three or four read better than children taught at age five or six. Those taught at age seven or eight were even further behind. Importantly, this held true even when comparing children with the same IQ and same socio-economic status.

KH-P + RMG: Is [mathematical reasoning] the kind of knowledge that can be obtained from flash cards, or even from computer games that ask children to do comparisons between sets and simple counting and addition? No. What is needed are the gritty, day-to-day experiences of exploring, manipulating, sorting, dividing, and recombining that children have as they play with objects.

BB: At what point did learning to recognize quantity and perform mathematical equations, and having "gritty, day-to-day experiences" become mutually exclusive? This argument has been put forward because the authors – like so many critics of baby education – believe that lesson time will take away from playtime, meaning that babies and small children who are given lessons could miss out on everyday learning.

In fact, lessons for babies take barely any time at all. Flash card-based lessons (which are the main target of the authors' criticism) last all of 10 seconds. Give them three times per day, as Glenn Doman recommends, and that adds up to 30 seconds per day. Teach your baby both reading and math using flash cards, and the total lesson time equals one minute per day!

For those using DVDs or computer software, we recommend that lessons be kept to 15 minutes maximum. Young babies should not look at a screen for longer than 15 minutes in one sitting. However, as the child gets older and begins to interact with her parents and the lesson, it would be okay to increase the time up to 30 minutes. For information on this, go to the TV + Computers section.

Regarding the value of play and children's "day-to-day" experiences, we couldn't agree more with the authors. Children learn not only math but just about anything you care to mention simply through playing. We recommend that your child spend as much time as possible playing. Contrast this with the half hour maximum we recommend for DVD- or software-based lessons, and it's easy to see that your child will spend more of his waking hours at playtime than anything else.