"...as time goes on we are finding that many kids can learn more complicated things at a younger age than we thought possible only a few years ago."
My usual question in response: "Who, exactly, is "we" ?"
Scandinavian schools have been teaching to this idea for decades as have many other European countries.
I have serious ideological problems with the USAmerican concept that they are at the apex of civilisation and all things cultural.
Regarding the 'free bass' concept, the small student accordion on my shelf has only free base - it is Russian and designed for the tiny hands of
I wonder who ‘we’ is myself at times. I’m a product of the forties in a large, urban, American school district. The system, at least in the school I attended had a philosophy, supposedly based on research, that at such and such a grade, kids should be able to learn blah, blah, blah. So, kindergarten had almost no academics apart from learning the alphabet and counting to twenty. But at the end of the kindergarten years, all of the kids had to take what was a group IQ test. Based on that, a bunch of us, myself included, were placed in classes for the next year that combined first and second grade curriculum. The teachers were, by and large, unprepared for that task, faced mandatory retirement at seventy, and many of them were close to that.
Jumping ahead to the sixties, when I began to take education classes in college and graduate school, the system hadn’t changed much despite the addition of large numbers of kids with socioeconomic, cultural, and language differences. The research was reaching conclusions that had the capabilities of kids, at least intellectually, higher at the various grade levels, but the teachers were not finding that, probably due to those differences I listed above. Also, because the system was huge with a bureaucracy to match, it’s still playing catch-up fifty years later.
My granddaughter, now 22 and a recent college graduate, attended a small suburban school district. She was learning in kindergarten what I learned in second grade, and the comparison held true for all of her school years.
That’s quite a long explanation of ‘we.’ I must also add that at the time I was in elementary school, kids learned to play musical instruments only because their parents bought them the instruments and paid for private lessons. Today, American schools, even in large urban districts, include teaching instrumental music. As far as I know, however, there’s only one elementary school in the large urban district I attended that teaches accordion to some of its kids, and that school is close to the border with a suburb. They teach Stradella bass.
