Accelerated early childhood education

Accelerated early childhood education is an ad hoc description of a loose movement, and pedagogy, according to which infants and toddlers benefit greatly from systematic, "academic"-type learning far earlier than has normally been thought appropriate. While there is no generally accepted name for the movement, it has been in existence since at least the 1964 publication of Glenn Doman's How to Teach Your Baby to Read. Doman and those who followed in his footsteps are in no small part responsible for the proliferation of educational videos aimed at infants and toddlers, such as "Baby Einstein." There has since been a backlash against the movement and these products, with critics accusing parents of wishful thinking and suppliers of products as profiteering.

Can babies be taught to read?

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A good place to begin a discussion of accelerated early childhood education is with very early reading.

The notion that babies and small toddlers can be taught to read--after a fashion, at least--often provokes disbelief and astonishment. But it is well-known and easy to demonstrate that children as young as one year old can learn to say printed words out loud. Consider the YouTube video at right. In it, the child is presented with a number of pages with words written on them, such as "ball," "banana," "no," and with no other clues. The child has no trouble saying the word written on the card. The reader may be convinced that the phenomenon is real by watching any of the dozens of similar videos on YouTube and other websites. Note that this is a different sort of case from those in which gifted children simply "pick up" the ability to read, without any explicit instruction. Rather, the child has been deliberately taught to memorize the words.

Early childhood development experts and educationists have known for a long time that it is indeed possible to teach tiny children to memorize words in this way, but are not very impressed. Many of them deny that it is really reading; they are, instead, merely "barking at print," memorizing the overall shape of a word and associating it with the sound of the word. Still, it is very likely that many reading one-year-olds have a passable understanding of words like "dog" and "cat." Indeed, children as early as nine months have shown that they understand to some extent, by for example pointing to their heads when they see the word "head."

How are babies taught to read?

How are babies taught to "read" in this way? There are an increasing number of "teach your baby to read" products available.