ah, here we are:
http://www.ime.usp.br/~vwsetzer/reading.html
"In a similar way that one may train a horse to dance - which is not proper to its nature -, one can train a small child how to read. In this case, one would be forcing a capacity which is not proper to the child's development. The problem is that, as the child is in the beginning of this process, improper actions disrespecting a "normal" development may disturb the whole future life. In fact, forcing its formal abstraction abilities one would be robbing the child some inner "forces" which should be devoted to his/her physical (that is, organ) and psychological develpment. "
"We have said that a small child loses a lot if s/he is trained to read too early. One may ask the question: what is gained through that learning? In our opinion, nothing is gained in terms of inner positive development, on the contrary, the child has made a negative development, that is, of something that should had remained strange to him/her. One of the negative developments is precisely the early development of intellectual abilities. This is what attracts some parents to early reading. For us, this is a tragedy. One is not letting the child be as childish as s/he should. This is done through the sacrifice of the forces we referred to above. We conjecture that, as a consequence, one triggers cristalization processes, leading to eventual precocious sclerosis processes later on in life. "
The important thing is that these beliefs are founded on solid scientific data, and not on uninformed opinion and conjecture, right?
