This paper (actually three short articles) describes Louis Benezet's now-80-year-old experiment to delay the teaching of formal arithmetic until grade 7. This article has been the subject of much debate over the years, and (as far as I know) there has been no real modern equivalent; I'm interested to know: what do you all think?
In the spirit of open discussion, I'll hold off on giving my own opinion until down in the comments; hopefully this will let those who are not familiar with this article read it relatively free of bias.
I find this fascinating. I do think that we should really implement this, not only with one language, but we should start teaching foreign languages to kids as soon as possible, not only focusing on one language.
I still find it fascinating that after all this time, and despite this experiment being relatively well-known, there seems to have been no real equivalent since then. I think there are political hurdles to implementing something like this (particularly given the current bent, at least in the US, toward standardized testing, and the current state of those standards), but I think they are not insurmountable. Jo Baoler describes promising results in this paper (under the heading "EVIDENCE OF EQUITABLE TEACHING "), though even that was nearly 15 years ago and seems not to have "caught on." That's really interesting, and something I hadn't really thought of before (at least not insofar as it relates specifically to Benezet's curriculum). It seems logical to me that learning a second language is beneficial to young students, even if they don't make much practical use of that language later in life. I'm not familiar with any research in this area, though; I think it would make an interesting experiment! On my more radical days, I might argue that we should get students started from that young age not only with additional natural languages, but also with programming languages... we should really implement this
not only with one language, but we should start teaching foreign languages to kids as soon as possible
I have personally introduced my 5 year old to writing Ruby code, just basic things like his Name = Age and then having him type his name to display his age. And showing him that he can add numbers together etc. We even did Thomas trains and I set up Tidmouth Sheds (an array) :D Now I've had some experience in schools and have studied the curriculum a bit more, I'm of the opinion we should be showing kids code from a young age -- but NOT forcing them to take lessons. More as a fun activity to build familiarity with coding concepts, some great ways to do this have been using Scratch and Kodu -- infact we had a year 8 class playing Kodu earlier today. and I was first shown it when some visiting year 5s came in to see the school.
I definitely agree that we need to be starting foreign languages earlier, and ideally providing students more opportunities to use their skills -- school trips, practical activities like magazine creation, non-English school events. My own MFL experience was appalling, I had no interest in learning French or Spanish but was interested in German; as such I acted up in lessons and fell behind rather quickly. But then, when I was actually given the chance to take German (and only German) I worked hard and studied, but from bad habits and several missed lessons I soon fell behind and failed that class; I feel like the school did not even try to equip me with the tools to work around problems like that... Indicative of my whole school experience really.