this sums up why, if it was only financially feasible, i wouldn’t put jan into a local school:

The problem is that academic hothousing is subject to the law of diminishing returns.

True, it can sometimes yield the sort of results that make teachers gawp and parents crow: but what about the longer term? Does all that early learning pay off later?

No. The latest research suggests that reaching learning milestones early is no guarantee of future academic stardom.

One study in Philadelphia found that, by the age of seven or eight, there was no discernible gap between the performance of children who spent their pre-school years in nurseries that were rigidly academic and those who came from laid-back, play-based ones. The only difference was that the hothoused kids tended to be more anxious and less creative.

While many believe that knowing letters, numbers, shapes and colours is the best preparation for school, teachers take a very different view. They say that the child who arrives at reception socially adept, who knows how to share, empathise and follow instructions, will stand a better chance of mastering the three Rs later on.

The argument that more testing and toil is the best way to shape them for life in the 21st century is starting to fray at the edges. A report by King’s College London suggests that the cognitive development of British children is slowed by spending too little time messing around outdoors.

“By stressing only the basics - reading and writing - and testing like crazy you reduce the level of cognitive stimulation,” says Philip Adey, professor of education at King’s College. “Children have the facts but they are not thinking very well.”

In the future, the biggest rewards will go not to the yes-men who know how to serve up an oven-ready answer, but to the nimble-minded innovators who can think across disciplines, delve into a problem for the sheer hell of it and relish the challenge of learning throughout their lives.

unfortunately, even if i sell both my kidneys, we don’t be able to come up with the thousands of dollars required to even land a place in the german school, for example, which is asking for some 10K euro as a kind of bond, and annual school fees of more than S$15K. arrrgh!

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