Sir, - Your photograph (The Irish Times, September 2nd) of Kaylan, aged 4, starting school stirred me to tears and to write. Surely four years of age is too young for a child to go into our school system? I am a concerned parent of three young children aged five, four and one. In many countries - Germany, France, Finland, Denmark, Holland, for example - the starting age is six or seven, with pre-school education beginning at four.
At four, children need to be encouraged and reminded to do almost everything; in short, they need a lot of individual attention. How can a teacher of 25 to 35 four-year-olds give that kind of attention, even with a classroom assistant? Some children cope but a lot do not and suffer greatly. Maybe we need to look at some of the problems we are seeing in adolescence, such as suicides and violence, and then look back to children's first experiences in our school system, when they were only babies and we cut them loose, forced them to be mature and responsible at the age of four.
- Yours, etc.,
Catherine McIntyre, Ballinteer Drive, Dublin 16.