Overzealous mothers prep their infants too early for school

What was the young mother to do? There was her little boy, barely three years old, staring vacantly at the wall and distractedly mumbling advanced kanji combinations. She called him; he seemed not to hear, and went right on mumbling, “Ikki ichiyu, ikki ichiyu…” (The expression means to be glad and sad by turns; it surely meant nothing at all to the child.)

The mother abruptly made a decision—her boy was quite learned enough, for now. She withdrew him from “ultra-early education.”

Well-intentioned though they may be, parents who start prepping children in infancy for the competitive education that lies ahead are “damaging the children’s brains,” says Shukan Bunshun (Sept 18).

The magazine cites an even more extreme case, that of a 2-year-old girl who night after night would howl in a weird voice that echoed all over the neighborhood. “People thought we were abusing her; we had the police here checking up,” says the girl’s mother. Not abuse but infant education proved the culprit. The parents took her out of school, and she soon calmed down.

In an education system whose keystone is a series of entrance exams that lead the successful candidate into the best schools and the best jobs, an early leg-up is seen as a gift a caring parent confers on his or her offspring. A 1971 bestseller didn’t start the trend but pulled out all the stops in it. The book’s author was Sony co-founder Masaru Ibuka. The title says it all: “Nursery School Is Too Late.”

The book’s thesis, as Shukan Bunshun summarizes it, is that the cells in the brain’s cerebrum are 80% formed by the time a child reaches the age of three; therefore, “there is no such thing as teaching a child too much before age three.”

The class that the boy mentioned above began attending before he was a year old was centered around drill with flash cards. “The flash cards had pictures or kanji characters on them. The teacher would hold each one up for 0.5 seconds, and the children would shout out what was written or drawn on it. It was explained to us that this stimulates the right side of the brain.”

Maybe it does, but at what cost? “Children who are exposed daily to flash cards at a mechanical pace will often lose their appetite, or their eyes will glaze over, or they’ll shriek in strange voices or be prone to violent outbursts,” says Keio University pediatrics lecturer Hisako Watanabe. “Early education appears to be very stressful for children.”

On the face of it, this seems so self-evidently true that it’s hard to imagine parents en masse failing to perceive it on their own. That they do fail, says Shukan Bunshun, is a symptom of the growing isolation of the shrinking nuclear family. Grandparents and other relatives are generally out of the picture, neighbors are strangers, and parents—often the mother on her own, since the father tends to be focused on his job—must make all the difficult decisions on their own, with no prior experience as a guide. Books that urge parents to quick action, implicitly threatening their children will be left behind otherwise, can be very persuasive under those circumstances.

“Children have the ability to communicate almost immediately after birth,” says Shukan Bunshun. “Early education is okay if it complements the infant’s natural development. But early education as we have it in Japan is in many cases a purely commercial undertaking that totally ignores what we know of human development, brain development and neuroscience.”

“For the sake of the children’s future,” it adds, “parents must not be led astray into overdoing early education.”

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Latest 15 of 29 Total Comments Show All

kokuryu at 05:05 AM JST - 23rd September

It is about time I saw something that mentioned how bad it was to follow these early eduction things and how bad the current teaching methods are. The early teaching methods need to be interactive, informative, and done by the parents.
Ninjazilla at 12:17 PM JST - 23rd September

Penn and Teller did a good episode of their cable show that dealt with this,if anything this kind of stuff makes the kids stupider.
greencardfan at 04:17 PM JST - 23rd September

Hear, hear, Zurcronium. ZERO TV for kids till the age of two, storybooks, storybooks and more storybooks. Nursery rhymes and songs together. Hell, just TALK to your kids.
timeon at 05:51 PM JST - 23rd September

in Japan, I would be more worried about the social skills of my kids that their academic ability.
medievaltimes at 04:56 AM JST - 24th September

Timeon -

Great point. It never stops to amaze me at how most Japanese people lack even the most basic of social skills.
noborito at 10:40 AM JST - 24th September

Wish this page referenced the Japanese article. There are a ton of Japanese people who should read it.
Kameleon at 01:51 PM JST - 24th September

I still believe men & women intending to have a baby should have to undergo tests such as humane behaviour, common sense, logic, diplomacy etc. And if they can prove themselves decent human beings not intent on ruining their childs life, then allow them to have a baby.

These parents ignorantly blinded by elitism need educating themselves.
dennis0bauer at 03:26 PM JST - 24th September

Young kids can learn a lot but it has toe be in a fun way and interesting way. So i would suggest the pocket monster/kamen rider/dekaranger method.

Kameleon, it seems that Common sense is the first thing that is de-learned in the japanese school-system
soldave at 04:29 PM JST - 24th September

What?! The police came when reports of domestic/child abuse were reported!!! The fact that people actually called the police is shocking enough!
DeepAir65 at 12:01 PM JST - 25th September

We first came across this when our neigbours 2yo could not come out to play because he was "studying" for his Keio University pre-School entrance exam!

Japanese children never seem to get a childhood and it is very sad. By playing with other children they do not get to develop their social skills and the rest, as they say, is history.

Still at least they are more polite to adults than American and Russian teenagers!
Bungleer at 03:24 PM JST - 25th September

Our son is 4 1/2, we never had him watch TV until he was two or so. Even now he's only allowed to watch very few programmes and DVDs and we're always watching together, to help him understand the things he sees there.

We have never tried to make him learn anything. Rather we've been trying to listen very closely to what he's interested in, what he wants to know and give him as much support, input and stimulation as possible according to his very own needs.

Now he can read Hiragana and starts learning Katakana, without either me or my wife ever having tought him how to (OK with the Katakana he's now using practice books, but he wanted us to buy them for him). He says he just picked it up, same with the Latin alphabet, I showed him the table with the letters a few times, but then he just somehow picked it up and he can read an write the German alphabet just as well (he still doesn't get how to form words out of the single letters yet, though, for that matter Japanese syllabaries are much more straight forward, I guess).

Self motivated learning is the best way to learn stuff. The point is how to keep the motivation going, because children are like a sponges soaking up information, when they're ready to do so. There's no point in trying to squeeze anything into a sponge...

I've learned 70% of what I know outside of school, because I wanted to know. Same with the kids.
MissWorldTravel at 11:29 AM JST - 26th September

sending very young kids to school is cruel but it doesnt mean one should brush off the resposibility of educating. A kid between 3-5 have incredible learning ability and any parent who neglect to harness this ability for at 10-15 mins a day are irreponsible parents. Mixing up games flash cards, story telling and songs is fun and also promotes bonding. Leaving your kids to his/her devices is not the way. Im also concerned at how the author seems to view flash cards negatively. Why consider the extremes. A lot of study have proven its effectiveness. The comment by the University lecturer apply in extremes cases and I dont think a person can have enough attention fron this young kids for such a long period to cost it to look glazed. sounds like someone is exxagerating.
JoiceRojo at 03:41 AM JST - 4th October

Early education? No way! I think it's harmful rather than stimulating, because you force the child to focus on learning something (kanjis, letters, etc) IMHO, I think it's better to have the child play with different toys, explore anything, listen music and go to zoos, museums and entertainment parks, it is the neural conections that make the child intelligent, and you don't have to forget the development of social skills...
projecthaberno at 09:24 PM JST - 6th October

I teach some kids classes at home. My older son (5) has no interest in joining the classes. He keeps busy with his toys and art projects with my wife. My younger son (3) wakes up in the morning and says, "Today we're having an English lesson, right?" He joins in with the nine-year-old wild boys. Today, he was teaching them to count to nine so they could say their ages. He loves "Bingo" and "Concentration".

Both boys grew up in more or less the same environment, but are turning out a bit differently. It's their genetic makeup and there's nothing we can do about it except encourage them in their interests.
Blue_Tiger at 01:28 PM JST - 21st October

Some of the Eikaiwas I've taught in have started having cklasses with children who were 1-1/2 to 3 years old. With the really yung nes, the mother is there, but, really, my view is that this is waaaaaay to early for an education like that in a school of any kind. The best "early education" is done by Mom and Dad at home...