Lisa, Leanna and Harry are examples of the three-year-olds who learned the alphabet letter-shapes and sounds in an hour and how to read and write phonetically in approximately five hours. This seems miraculous, because most children begin to learn the alphabet letters at the age of six and usually one letter per week. All of the pre-school children learned to read and they loved every minute of the learning because it was all done through play. All of children in their class were reading fluently by the age of four.
In the United States, a child normally begins to learn to read at First Grade and then it can take from 3 to 5 years, compared to 3-5 hours with Gertrude Garrow’s methodology. Shockingly, 25% of Grade 4 children fail to reach grade level in reading.
(A child is eligible for First Grade if the child is six years of age before September 1 of the current school year. 2nd grade age (7-8) 3rd (8-9) 4th (9-10))
An assessment of 535,000 five year-olds in England found that after a year of schooling, 91,000 could not write simple words such as ‘mum’ or ‘cat’ or hold a pencil correctly, i.e. fewer than half have reached their expected level of learning
In 2000/01 the total UK managed expenditure on education services for under 5’s was: 2.7 billion; 28 billion on schools. The number of children who had mastered basic literacy and numeracy in 2005 was much lower than in the previous year (The Times, 27 October 2006).