A little learning

Because my birthday falls at the end of August I was always the youngest in my class. Fifty years later I learned that this had put me at some disadvantage and looking back I can see the truth of this. It took me until I was about 13 or 14 before I could fully compete with my peers.
However I did not feel especially disadvantaged at the time; I probably tried harder and I suppose I have been rewarded for that in the long run. Neither my teachers nor my parents knew about this phenomenon. My parents talked from time-to-time about my being a "late developer" but I wasn't really. I just developed later than the older boys in my class - in other words, at a normal rate.
My point here is that because nobody knew that there was a problem, there was no problem.
This morning I listened to Ed Balls reject the idea of raising the school starting age to 6 because "we have to identify problems early and intervene early". This remark seems to encapsulate the problem and my intuition tells me that early intervention often creates problems where none might exist, if children were simply allowed to mature at their own rate.
England leads the world in starting children at school early and it has to be said that the results are no better at the other end than other developed countries, and in some cases a lot worse. My children started school at the age of 6 in Canada and as adults they turned out just as well as if they had started at 5.
I remember reading about 40 years ago about the theory of "learning readiness" put forward by some educational psychologists. The concept was that at certain ages you could easily accept learning that had been difficult at an earlier age. So, for example, a boy of 8 could start learning to read and in two months would be on par with those who had been reading for three years. And these observations were made from a time when some children started school later.
We have become obsessed with add-on solutions rather than radical ones. We start our children in school too early, but rather than recognize the value of children being allowed to grow. There obvious difficulties with children coming into school at 4 or 5 so strategies that emphasize play over learning are developed. 40 years ago when infant school teachers discovered that children struggled with the letters of the alphabet developed the so-called Infant Teaching Alphabet so that children could learn vowels phonetically and then go on to learn the real alphabet when they were ready. I wonder what happened to that? Now there seems to be a movement to get children to start school earlier, give them piles of homework.
And what are the results? The evidence would suggest that there are more children who come out of school functionally illiterate than at any time since public schooling was made compulsory in 1870. Government figures have been manipulated to demonstrate otherwise but the empirical evidence clearly shows that we have significant issues.
I don't want to romanticize my schooling. In those days schools were poorly resourced and under-equipped. Lighting was only turned on in the afternoon in the darkest days of winter because to leave them on would be too costly. Paper was very scarce. However, we did learn. I remember learning multiplication tables by rote in infant school and learning to read but not much else. It was a stern establishment and play was only allowed in the yard at "playtime". We presumably consolidated this knowledge at Primary School for four years where we had no homework. Homework only began for me when I went to Grammar School and for my contemporaries who went to Secondary Modern not at all. If I were to judge by results none of this mattered. Of my friends and contemporaries who went to the Secondary Modern School, one had a career as a newspaper reporter, another became a senior police officer, another an insurance agent, another a hotel manager, another a printer and another a successful artist. Others took on apprenticeships and followed these with trade careers. Some filled ordinary unskilled jobs. I don't remember any of them unable to read and write at a functional level at the age of 11.
Something, or perhaps many things, have gone wrong since those days. We should perhaps look at the intervention of well-meaning control-freaks. Children are now controlled and organized at school and at play. Parents are controlled at every level of activity. Schoolteachers are subject to controls that disallow any professional initiative. Cui bono?