Holt . . . "Timetables"--Children are not trains . . .

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 stop along the route. If it is ten minutes late getting into a station, he begins to worry. In the same way, we say that if children are going to know 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 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—are less dissociated from the world—and later from these hard things learn the “easy” ones. Thus children who read well certainly know a lot of “phonics,” but they have probably learned at least as much phonics from words as they have learned words from phonics.
It may be true enough that in learning purely physical skills, such as sports, gymnastics, ballet, or playing musical instruments—though not even these are “purely” physical, nothing is—we generally have to learn easy movements before we learn hard ones. That is how the body works. But it is not how the mind works. What makes things easy or hard for our minds has very little to do with how little or how much information they may contain, and everything to do with how interesting they are and, to say it once again, how much sense they make, how connected they seem to reality.