When Slow Is Fast Enough

Book excerpt: "Fascinating, lively, well-documented, and challenging....Both timely and necessary....An ideal resource for professionals who work with delayed children. It is so readable, it will also be valued by parents of these children." --Lee Combrinck-Graham, M.D. In matters of education, are all children created equal? Despite reforms that champion the rights of handicapped youngsters, are we really punishing such children with the very systems that are supposed to help them? Joan Goodman's bold and controversial book asks what we are accomplishing in early intervention programs that attempt to accelerate development in delayed young children. She questions the value of such programs on educational, psychological, and moral grounds, suggesting that in pressuring these children to perform more, and sooner, we undermine their capacity for independent development and deprive them of the freedom we insist upon for the nondelayed. Goodman argues that we need a more tolerant, less directive model of instruction in which the aim is to support the child's natural and spontaneous, albeit slow, development and to stimulate individual processes of discovery and self-expression. The elements of this more supportive model are then described in detail. Raising fundamental questions about our ambitions for children and how we fulfill them, this lively and provocative book is bound to stir controversy. It is especially timely as early intervention programs rapidly gear up to serve all handicapped children from ages 0 to 5.