[fred_durst]

Even if that were true, I would have learned much less as there were many things I and many children learned via reading far before the age of 11. So while they supposedly caught up on reading, they had missed out on several years of learning when the brain is most capable of doing so.

And honestly, that study is so loose. It reminds of the good ol' days of Whole Word learning and how many kids lives they screwed up with that experiment gone bad.

http://www.readinghorizons.com/research/whole-language-vs-ph...

EDIT: Apparently, I need to clarify loose. Sample size: 267

[learc83]

>So while they supposedly caught up on reading, they had missed out on several years of learning when the brain is most capable of doing so.

Reading is not the only way to learn, and before a certain age it looks like it's not the most effective. There are many more studies that show that a play based education up until age 7 is superior to a rigorous academic education at the same age.

The evidence shows that it is very likely that spending an extra 2 years playing, and exploring is better than spending that time in the class practicing reading picture books.

Older children also progress faster, so an 8 year old who started learning to read at age 7 is reading much more sophisticated material than a 6 year old who started at age 5. It's not like there is an equivalent 2 year loss of reading time.

>And honestly, that study is so loose.

Care to offer some meaningful critique.

>how many kids lives they screwed up with that experiment gone bad.

In this case starting school later is not the experiment. It was the way things were for most of human history.

Schooling at 4 and 5 years old is a very recent invention--the data doesn't back up its effectiveness--so we should eliminate it.

Edit: In response to the above edit. There is nothing inherently wrong with a sample size of 267. That's actually a fairly large sample size for studies like this. My brother is a grad student in applied linguistics. He'd kill for 267 study participants for his second language acquisition research.