Baby talk
If you’ve ever been a babysitter, you’ve surely heard of the Baby Einstein series of books, toys, and DVDs. This scam company (owned by Disney) claims to enhance a baby’s mental maturity by exposing her early on to a multitude of high-calibre art, music, and literature. Exposure to the Dead-White-Man Canon can never start too soon — there’s a Van Gogh series, a Mozart series, and, ridiculously, even a Shakespeare series.
And now, A Small World In Saugus, a company based in Santa Clarita, California, is following suit by opening a language school for infants. That’s right, little babies who don’t even speak English yet can get perk up their college application resumes before they learn how to walk by enrolling to learn French, Spanish, Chinese, or Italian.
Tara-Anne Johnson, the owner of A Small World in Saugus, assures cynics that the classes are specially formatted to suit even the youngest students’ (six months old) attention spans (I wasn’t aware that six month-olds had attention spans). The unique curriculum is made up of songs, visual and tactile learning aids, games, and structured group-work — which sounds pretty much like every other foreign language class in American schools — and is taught by native speakers who take a three-day training course for accreditation.
The results? Though no long-term studies have concluded anything that suggests starting a second language before you’ve got a first is beneficial, the school spews off the expected hoopla — “better SAT scores,” “more job opportunities,” “higher scores in math and science,” etc.
So, what to make of it all? Ultimately, the start-early argument probably is valid — it can’t hurt, at least — but what makes this ’school’ so creepy and fraudulent is their transparent marketing: Johnson reminds parents that if their kids “come in at 6 months old and stay for three months, are they going to remember it when they’re 8 years old? Probably not. The longer they’re in it, the more they’ll retain.”
Of course.
