Timetables! We act as if children were railroad trains running on a schedule. The railroad man figures that if his train is going to get to Chicago at a certain time, then it must arrive on time at every wtop along the route. If it is ten miniutes late getting into a station, he begins to worry. In the same way, we say that if children are going to known so much when they go to college, then they have to know this at the end of this grade, and that at the end of that grade. If a child doesn't arrive at one of these intermediate stations when we think he should, we instantly assume that he is going to be late at the finish. But children are not railroad trains. They don't learn at an even rate. They learn in spurts, and the more interested they are in what they are learning, the faster these spurts are likely to be.
Not only that , but they often don't learn in what seems to us a logical sequence, by which we mean easy things first, hard things later. Being always seekers of meaning, children may first go to the hard things, which have more meaning, and later from these hard things learn the "easy" ones.
John Holt in How Children Learn
I think this is a fabulous point. Many, and hopefully most, people understand that infants and toddlers reach developmental milestones at different rates, and this is to be expected and perfectly okay. But for some reason, we expect all children after they have reached school age to be ready to learn and comprehend the same facts, grammatical rules, mathematical formulas, etc simply because they are the same age. This is ridiculous, and not an expectation we hold outside of primary and secondary education. Generally, by college, we have acknowledged that people have different strengths, and we no longer tell the English major that he must take all the same classes as the physics major. Nor would we expect either of them to easily comprehend all that is required of the other.
