Your opening sentence says it all. “...ready to learn when they start kindergarten.” !? “Ready” !? Does anyone really think the learning process languishes until admission to kindergarten allows it to begin? Yet, the false assumption your article begins with is, too often, a fundamental assumption of conventional education. By the time a most children start kindergarten, they’ve mastered the principles of least one language and amassed a vocabulary of thousands of words. They’ve learned to discriminate on the basis of sensory input and mastered intricate motor skills that they can apply successfully to the physical world they find around them. They’ve constructed a personality, and they’re busily forming their conception of reality. And what have we done to facilitate that early learning process? Put a tv in the child’s room (for about half under age three) to utterly confuse reality for them, and taught them the NAMES of the alphabet which have little to do with the sounds those letters represent. So the question is not: When are they going to begin to learn, but when are WE going to learn?