Preschool: Teaching Baby to Read

If preschool training is great for rich kids in nursery school and for poor kids in the Government's Head Start program, why shouldn't every parent get busy and give his child a head start at home? That reasoning, stimulated by parental pride and fear, has led to a barrage of books and packages that offer to help Mommy teach Baby how to read, add numbers and raise his IQ, even while he is sitting on the potty.

Among the do-it-yourself books, two are getting the most play.

How to Teach Your Baby to Read is an almost evangelical ode to early learning by Physical Therapist Glenn Doman, who has been teaching preschool children with brain damage to read at Philadelphia's Institutes for the Achievement of Human Potential. He contends that almost every young child has a "built-in rage for learning" and that parents have "a sacred duty to open the floodgate of all basic knowledge to him." Doman claims that a baby will take to the written word as easily as to the spoken language and can even learn to read before he learns to speak—if the written word is presented repeatedly and in large letters. His book details step-by-step teaching sessions, beginning at two years with several daily periods of less than five minutes each. Example: the parent touches the baby's toes, pronounces the word "toes," holds up a large sign with the word on it. Each session must be a "game" that both participants find "joyous," and it must always end before baby becomes bored. Since its publication in 1964, the book has sold 75,000 copies.

Doman and Carl Delacato, a remedial-reading specialist at the Philadelphia Institutes, have also produced a reading kit, which includes word cards, parents' manual and child's book. Parents have spent $400,000 on the kits—at $19.95 each—but a mother could do as well with just the $3.95 Doman book, plus a lettering pen and cardboard to fashion her own cards.

Give Your Child a Superior Mind is sold with the promise that if carefully followed, it will help a child "read 150 words a minute, add, subtract, multiply and divide, understand fractions and simple algebra, even handle abstract concepts and interpret them creatively"—all before he is five. It was written by Siegfried Engelmann, a research associate at the University of Illinois' Institute for Research on Exceptional Children, and his wife Therese, a psychologist. They argue unconvincingly that such intellectual giants as Goethe, Leibnitz, Mill and Macaulay benefited less from genes than from early teaching, conclude that parents can train their children to become gifted.

Unlike Doman, the Engelmanns say that a child has an "initial resistance" to learning, that "you must push him" and "make lessons a rigid part of his daily schedule." They urge parents to teach a baby names of parts of the body before he is 18 months old, start on the alphabet in five-minute lessons at 30 months, gradually work up to daily 90-minute lessons. The book details a sequence of teaching steps with specific instructions on how to get across such progressively more complex concepts as geometric shapes (by age three), counting backward (age four), fractions and inferences from statements (age five).