Researchers are now studying young minds and how to teach them — the kind of thing you might naively expect a school of education to study — and they’ve found that pre-schoolers can learn math much earlier than they’d assumed:
In a typical preschool class, children do very little math. They may practice counting, and occasionally look at books about numbers, but that is about it. Many classes devote mere minutes a day to math instruction or no time at all, recent studies have found — far less than most children can handle, and not nearly enough to prepare those who, deprived of math-related games at home, quickly fall behind in kindergarten.“Once that happens, it can be very hard to catch up,” said Julie Sarama, a researcher in the graduate school of education at the University at Buffalo who, with her colleague and husband, Doug Clements, a professor in the same department, developed a program called Building Blocks to enrich early math education.
“They decide they’re no good at math — ‘I’m not a math person,’ they say — and pretty soon the school agrees, the parents agree,” Dr. Clements said.
“Everyone agrees.”
Notice the amusing assumption that children “deprived of math-related games at home” fall behind because of that deprivation. I’m sure those children are otherwise identical to the children playing math games at home. Right?