They didn't tell me that one. I could hardly read at 8

Once I started reading tho things really opened up for me

There was an article I read by Keith Gessen about contacting his 3rd grade teacher as a parent during Covid and the thing that stuck out with me was the teacher talking about how some kids entered kindergarten able to read and some didn’t learn until second grade and in third grade, you’d be hard-pressed to know which ones were which.

This helped calm me as a parent of kids who entered first grade in the fall of 2020 not able to read (I was one of those early readers). My daughter picked up reading during the course of first grade but her twin brother not so much. Then, during the first month of second grade, he went from refusing to read “the” in a chapter title when I would read to them at bedtime to being a self-sufficient solo reader pretty much overnight.

Both of my kids are pretty dedicated readers now. When we go on vacation, if they spot a library, they want to visit it. I’m always happy to oblige.

I was one of the kids who didn’t learn to read until the 3rd grade. The only kid, as I was made aware at the time.

At first the urgency to rectify the situation propelled me into not only learning but reading a lot, but I didn’t know how much my peers were reading or what, so I started reading voraciously

Didn’t take long to outpace my peers. I have kept it up ever since

And? I was literally reading high school and college texts then, are you indirectly claiming that this wasn't the case?

No I don’t doubt your ability to read.

I just happened to grow up in a similar time and culture with libraries, child prodigies, etc and it seems quaint and a little silly in retrospect.

I see, thanks for clarifying. I don't know. I still think the most important thing we can do is empower children to be as smart and well-rounded as they can be. As the only intellectual, atheist, etc. in my entire living family I experienced a near-constant struggle for growing myself despite my circumstances.

I lived in poverty and abuse, under constant surveillance, and was subject to a cultural war for my own mind against my family and government. This led to strong feelings about my own capabilities and intellectualism, and a desire to prove others wrong about my limitations.

Maybe on one side it might seem a little silly, but the child in me still takes all of this extremely seriously even now in my 30s. The cultural and intellectual war against children never ended, we just stopped paying attention or became complicit with the system.

> I still think the most important thing we can do is empower children to be as smart and well-rounded as they can be

I agree. If we were actually gifted kids they should have given us real challenges with a chance of failure or discovery. Instead they just told us how smart we were and taught to emulate the appearance of intelligent people. Memorizing passages, quotes, checking out prestigious books. It’s to such a degree that much of millennial culture is references and tokens of intellectual landmarks from the 20th century - with no accomplishments for itself.

I did NOT experience this level of abuse or control but I did go to a religious school - not a weird one but you know they beat children just as much or more as the other schools there did and all that talk about the kindness of Jesus seemed to mean very little to them. Information was not controlled there, however, so one eventually did get to make one's own mind up.

I can see how you had a struggle to emerge and overcome a form of control. I can understand it because I had a similar, though much smaller, struggle.

I also studied independently at a more advanced level than I was supposed to be at. Not sure I follow why this seems quaint or silly to you.

Half of all people are above average.

(Or maybe a third of all people if you count it as a range rather than a point.)

Only if you assume normal distrubition or similar where median and average are the same.

What did it do for you?

I enjoyed it, and it gave me confidence that I was capable of doing some interesting things. My schooling wasn't very inspirational.

Still not sure why it seems silly to you.

What seems silly to me is the particular cultural excitement and optimism around education and liberalism, and the way it was manifest in school, that I lived through as a kid and is now dead.

We may be talking about different eras. I'm Gen X, I don't remember any great excitement or optimism manifested in schools of my time.

Quite the contrary; I think I was one of only two or three people in my year to go on to university. But then I was a huge nerd who was really interested in ideas.

Yes I think that’s right. Thanks for sharing. Kids of the 60s-70s who were outsiders because of their academic/nerdy interest became teachers and created a culture with the ideals they thought were missing. And that’s what I experienced.

It’s not all that hard to read high school texts for kids that know how to read. It just exposes them to many words they have to infer from context.

I think that’s either something you enjoy, or don’t.