I've never seen an instance where kids exposed to dumbed-down "reduced complexity" material outperform those that weren't
Isn't literally every subject taught exactly this way? Books for toddlers don't have chapters for a reason. Practicing basics as early as possible, means that you don't have to think about little things when you move on to more complex subjects. You spent a long time practicing addition before anybody even told you about the concept of multiplication.
The reason that books for toddlers lack chapters is that authors believe that toddlers aren't ready to comprehend chapters, not that it is an immutable truth of the universe that humans can't handle a separated narrative structure in writing until they've orbited the sun five or six times. Soviet children started Pushkin right when they started school- when I asked my Russian teachers for good examples of Russian children's books, they said that the concept didn't really exist when they were children, because they started studying real literature pretty much as soon as they started school.
The idea that there are "basics" that can be safely ignored once learned is patently false. Everything I've read from great performers in any field- piano, cooking, mathematics, physics, etc- contains constant encouragement to return to and refine one's understanding of the fundamental skills of the practice. I did indeed spend a long time practicing addition before anyone informed me that it was time to "move on" to multiplication, and it wasn't until I graduated college with a degree in aerospace engineering that I had read a few books about the history of mathematics and found out that the manipulation of Arabic numerals via "addition" or "multiplication" was simply shorthand for counting, which itself is a fundamental mathematical art. What was taught to me as "multiplication" is actually "one particular algorithmic notation for representing the counting of multiple sets", not "objective mathematical law".
Had I disabused myself of the notion that there was any part of mathematics that I could "stop thinking about" because they were "little", I would have made a much better showing in school.
Yep. We don't start 1st graders with calculus, we start them with arithmetic. Variables are called variables by late elementary school, algebra is more properly taught as algebra in 8th or 9th grade (US), with geometry, trig, and calculus following that.
You can develop a similar plan for teaching programming that starts with basics and progressing (variables, linear control flow (aka, no conditionals or loops), conditionals, loops, functions/subroutines, complex types like records, recursion, modules and classes; in roughly that order). You aren't hiding anything, you aren't misstating anything, you just don't move on to advanced things until it's time to. Of course, this progression would probably be a lot faster than the arithmetic -> calculus progression.
"Until it's time to" is a completely arbitrary choice, though. I still am not convinced that it's tremendously important to introduce loops and conditionals before typing symbols into a computer is introduced. Would a class of students introduced to pre-programming seriously outperform a class of students not introduced to pre-programming in the long term? Certainly the short-term gains would be obvious, but I don't think there would be any difference in the long term, and the brilliant students from each group would be roughly equally matched after many years, with the primary differentiating factors being genetic ability and amount and type of studying, like it is in most other subjects.
The ex-Soviets I know speak reverently of the superiority of Soviet mathematics education, which begun much later than American mathematics education, and was far more rigorous.
There's certainly nothing wrong if a child wants to explore pre-programming on their own, but I think there is little to no value in deliberately exposing them to it in a bastardized form in order to "prepare them for what they'll see later".
Also, the assumption that there actually should be an arithmetic -> calculus progression is itself a pernicious issue- reference page 24 of this PDF for an extremely accurate takedown of the American mathematics curriculum: https://www.maa.org/external_archive/devlin/LockhartsLament....
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Isn't literally every subject taught exactly this way? Books for toddlers don't have chapters for a reason. Practicing basics as early as possible, means that you don't have to think about little things when you move on to more complex subjects. You spent a long time practicing addition before anybody even told you about the concept of multiplication.
The reason that books for toddlers lack chapters is that authors believe that toddlers aren't ready to comprehend chapters, not that it is an immutable truth of the universe that humans can't handle a separated narrative structure in writing until they've orbited the sun five or six times. Soviet children started Pushkin right when they started school- when I asked my Russian teachers for good examples of Russian children's books, they said that the concept didn't really exist when they were children, because they started studying real literature pretty much as soon as they started school.
The idea that there are "basics" that can be safely ignored once learned is patently false. Everything I've read from great performers in any field- piano, cooking, mathematics, physics, etc- contains constant encouragement to return to and refine one's understanding of the fundamental skills of the practice. I did indeed spend a long time practicing addition before anyone informed me that it was time to "move on" to multiplication, and it wasn't until I graduated college with a degree in aerospace engineering that I had read a few books about the history of mathematics and found out that the manipulation of Arabic numerals via "addition" or "multiplication" was simply shorthand for counting, which itself is a fundamental mathematical art. What was taught to me as "multiplication" is actually "one particular algorithmic notation for representing the counting of multiple sets", not "objective mathematical law".
Had I disabused myself of the notion that there was any part of mathematics that I could "stop thinking about" because they were "little", I would have made a much better showing in school.
Yep. We don't start 1st graders with calculus, we start them with arithmetic. Variables are called variables by late elementary school, algebra is more properly taught as algebra in 8th or 9th grade (US), with geometry, trig, and calculus following that.
You can develop a similar plan for teaching programming that starts with basics and progressing (variables, linear control flow (aka, no conditionals or loops), conditionals, loops, functions/subroutines, complex types like records, recursion, modules and classes; in roughly that order). You aren't hiding anything, you aren't misstating anything, you just don't move on to advanced things until it's time to. Of course, this progression would probably be a lot faster than the arithmetic -> calculus progression.
"Until it's time to" is a completely arbitrary choice, though. I still am not convinced that it's tremendously important to introduce loops and conditionals before typing symbols into a computer is introduced. Would a class of students introduced to pre-programming seriously outperform a class of students not introduced to pre-programming in the long term? Certainly the short-term gains would be obvious, but I don't think there would be any difference in the long term, and the brilliant students from each group would be roughly equally matched after many years, with the primary differentiating factors being genetic ability and amount and type of studying, like it is in most other subjects.
The ex-Soviets I know speak reverently of the superiority of Soviet mathematics education, which begun much later than American mathematics education, and was far more rigorous.
There's certainly nothing wrong if a child wants to explore pre-programming on their own, but I think there is little to no value in deliberately exposing them to it in a bastardized form in order to "prepare them for what they'll see later".
Also, the assumption that there actually should be an arithmetic -> calculus progression is itself a pernicious issue- reference page 24 of this PDF for an extremely accurate takedown of the American mathematics curriculum: https://www.maa.org/external_archive/devlin/LockhartsLament....