This is a very US-centric article. Lots of other countries start out education with a fair degree of desk work, rote memorization (eg of the alphabet, basic addition and subtraction), expectations of being able to read by the end of the first year and so on...and they&#x27;re doing fine. My education in Ireland would probably have seemed pretty Dickensian by the author&#x27;s standards (although we also had unstructured time, physical play and so on), and yet Ireland consistently does well on measures of academic achievement and in terms of cultural capital.<p>My parents both liked reading (thanks Mm &amp; Dad) so I was lucky enough to be able to read before I went to school at age 4, and the idea that it&#x27;s bad for kids&#x27; brains to teach them to read before 5 or 6 just seems laughably delusional to me. I would have resented anyone trying to interfere with my reading at a young age and certainly plan on teaching my own kids to read should any come along. The article&#x27;s suggestion that kids can&#x27;t identify any similarity between the veins in a leaf and those in their hand because they&#x27;re being subjected to too much book learning strikes me as bizarre.<p>Of course one shouldn&#x27;t generalize from one&#x27;s own experience, but given the highly standardized nature of the educational curriculum I grew up with, if it was so bad I&#x27;d expect that to have manifested in the form of intractable social problems or declining international rankings by now.