If you announce that your child is learning a skill earlier than normal — or even just that you’d like her to have the option to do so — it’s very likely you’ll be bombarded with panicked cries and dire warnings from the culture.
Whether it’s your toddler learning to read or your 3rd grader doing advanced math, people will assume you’re a heartless taskmaster, that you’re cruelly pushing your child to achieve, and that you’re either oblivious or indifferent to the impact this pressure has on your child’s health and happiness.
Perhaps it’s possible to teach your 3-year-old to read, but it is developmentally inappropriate, you’ll be told. You’re steamrolling healthy development and undercutting a happy childhood. And for what? A slight leg up on the SAT in 15 years?
The cultural consensus is loud and clear: it’s wrong to teach skills “early”. If you do it, you obviously care more about status games and prestige than what your child actually needs to thrive.
But what determines whether a skill is being taught too early?
Very often, people look to tradition, not reality, to answer this question. Learning to read at ~5 to 6-years-old is considered appropriate because that is when school conventionally starts. A 3rd-grader learning algebra is suspicious because algebra is typically taught in high school. Indeed, many are even wary of parental efforts to bring Algebra to middle school.1
For every inquiry of: “Why learn this now and not earlier?”, we’re met with a shrug and an implied: “This is just what we’ve always done”.
But why use the conventional timeline as the standard to judge developmental appropriateness? Is this timeline dictated by the laws of nature, or is it the result of a man-made tradition—an approach long overdue for some innovation? What if instead of protecting children from the pressure of learning “too much too early”, we’re actually holding them down and holding them back?
There are alternative approaches that give us good reason to question the conventional timeline.
For over a century, for example, young children in Montessori environments have been gaining independence and learning advanced skills far earlier than normal. The formal reading curriculum begins around 2.5-years-old. By 5 or 6, it is normal for a child to already be reading chapter books independently, up to a traditional “3rd grade” level. A Montessori kindergartner is often able to do triple-digit multiplication and long division, skills that typically wait until 3rd grade or later.
Toddlers and preschoolers prepare snacks, even full meals; they also sweep floors, dust tables, and scrub windows. Even babies gain impressive skills early. Instead of being spoon-fed or drinking from a sippy cup, in Montessori a baby learns to sit at her own little table, eat with silverware, and drink from a tiny open glass from the moment she’s able to sit up comfortably, usually starting around 6-months-old.
At Alpha School, an innovative K12 program using AI tutors, the average student learns at twice the pace of conventional education, and regularly scores in the 99th percentile on standardized tests.2 Top students at Alpha learn even more, at around six times the conventional pace.
Yet, both Montessori and Alpha are a far cry from the stuffy and stifling model of early-achiever education that we expect from prep schools or Tiger parents.
There are no pushy and domineering adults forcing a breakneck speed. Montessori students have tremendous freedom to choose the work that most interests them at any point, and to go at their own pace. Alpha students use adaptive apps and engaging AI tutors. And in both approaches, adults are primarily a source of encouragement, support, and inspiration.
The intensive schedule allegedly necessary for high achievement, the schedule that looks like school-all-day and cram-school-all-evening, is also missing from Montessori and Alpha. The children’s lives are not taken over by study and homework; they are not going through life as if on a hamster wheel.
In reality, Montessori and Alpha’s results are achieved in a fraction of the typical school day. A Montessori work period in Children’s House (for ages ~3-6) is only three hours in the morning. At Alpha, students spend just two hours each morning focused on core academics; the rest of the day is spent on life skills or enrichment classes such as chess or robotics.
In both Montessori and Alpha, the teachers (called guides) consider it a grave failing if their students are not happy and excited to be learning. Enjoyment is not simply a nice-to-have or an ancillary consideration. Indeed, enjoyment is not in tension with learning at all — it’s central to each approach, a crucial factor in designing the learning technology, and a fundamental part of what makes every achievement possible.
By three crucial metrics, then, both Montessori and Alpha beat the allegations of developmental inappropriateness.
The skills are eminently possible to learn at these earlier ages. Montessori, in fact, has been tested for over a century with children from every possible socio-economic and cultural background.
The learning in both approaches is designed to be, and depends on being, deeply engaging and enjoyable.
And the required time investment is radically less than the time used even by conventional, non-ambitious education, which uses more time to get worse results.
In other words: children are capable of learning more, learning earlier, and learning more rigorously. They can do it without sacrificing their happiness. And they can do it while simultaneously adding more free time to their day.
The fact that an ambitious, enjoyable, and efficient education is possible is enough to convince many people of its value … but not everyone. For some, a vital question remains.
Why have an ambitious education at all? What’s the point of learning more, earlier?
To be sure, primary and secondary education play a role in later college opportunities and career outcomes. If a student’s goal is to get into MIT to study engineering, for example, it matters whether or not he’s already been exposed to calculus—both for gaining admission and for his success in the program.3
An ambitious education is most vital, however, in how it shapes the child’s expectations of life and of himself.
In Montessori, for example, young children are given presentations and the opportunity to practice many practical life skills that are advanced for their age. They learn to dress themselves independently, clean up after themselves, cook and serve meals.
A toddler who struggles and eventually succeeds at putting on and zipping a coat for the first time has climbed his own personal Mt. Everest. He has conquered an immense challenge, the same challenge he sees giants like his parents and teachers perform every day. Through his own efforts, he has proven himself to be their equal.
Emboldened by success, he propels himself forward and seeks ever greater achievements with a ravenous appetite. He learns to read, to add and subtract, to recognize and name every state, all with the same sense of challenge and delight. In Montessori, there is no division between “academic” and “non-academic” learning. Even the most seemingly mundane physical task like zipping a jacket is cognitive and intellectual. For a toddler to zip his jacket, it requires new, creative thought, trials and experimentation, problem-solving and ingenuity.
The child who learns in this way gains profound moral stature in his own eyes. He receives, and has truly earned, a strong dose of self-confidence and self-esteem. You can directly observe this in the child’s delighted exclamation: “I did it!”
Across the years of childhood, when day in and day out a child is allowed to conquer exciting challenges—from tying shoes, to reading a book, to studying the ancient Egyptians, to parsing a geometric proof—he comes to view himself as fundamentally capable and life as eminently navigable.
Contrary to the conventional concern of learning things too early, the major concern here is learning things too late. It is crucial that skills be presented when they are the most challenging they can be, while still remaining surmountable. A less challenging skill, presented at a time when it asks much less of a child will not have the same soul-building effect.
A 2-year-old who puts on his own coat for the first time has been elevated to the level of a giant. A 10-year-old who does the same has been reduced to the level of an ant. The 10-year-old experiences the task as a mere physical chore; it does not carry the raw newness, the untapped intellectual challenge, and therefore the moral weight that it does for a 2-year-old.
When a child’s education is ambitious, when it asks him to rise to the occasion and give his all, he becomes accustomed to a certain way of living. He comes to expect that life should be spent, and is most enjoyable when it is spent, in a particular way. Specifically, he learns that life is made up of thinking and working; of setting challenging goals, facing them with a straight spine, and overcoming them with head held high. It becomes natural to him to have a life made up of learning, growing, and achieving self-mastery; of becoming stronger and feeling the joy of one’s own strength.
Ultimately, the child is becoming accustomed to the human way of life.
Any individual who has made something of himself, who has accomplished a challenging goal worth achieving, in any realm—whether designing a rocket to the moon, or configuring the antidote to a disease, or building a romantic partnership that’s as soul nourishing at the height of happiness as when weathering a storm—has done so by tapping into this way of life.
What better way to spend one’s childhood than to see in oneself and to live out the essence of a Michelangelo creating the David, a Steve Jobs creating the iPhone, or a Michael Jordan winning six NBA championships?
We do not think a kitten needs to be protected from a life of pouncing, leaping, and stalking. We do not try to shield a puppy from running, sniffing, and digging. We know that a kitten must learn a cat’s way of life. We know that a dog is happiest to live a dog’s way of life.
Why, then, should we see it as a threat to be mitigated or a danger to be avoided to help a child live a human way of life?
An ambitious education, like what is offered by Montessori or Alpha, is not an imposition on a child, it is the essence and the wellspring of a life well lived.
https://www.usnews.com/education/k12/articles/in-what-grade-should-you-take-algebra-1
https://mitadmissions.org/apply/prepare/foundations/