[tremon]

Huh? Yes, the more skills the better. Your post doesn't exactly read as an attack on that assumption, but as a criticism on the method of teaching.

I agree, both the learning experience and the acquired skills matter. What's often overlooked is that every child develops at their own pace, and the skills progression taught in schools is based on both normative ideals and descriptive "modal" pace. Offering a child new material that they "should not be learning yet" is not a crime, nor an offense to the child, nor a criticism on other parenting methods (or other children, for that matter).

Not to mention that skills development doesn't occur across a single line. As an example, a child of a friend of mine is now almost two years old, and still vocalizes at most two syllables. Yet she's able to comprehend (and execute) very complicated sentences and commands, in two languages. Still, she's now officially labeled a "deficient" child, with all the counselling and monitoring that that entails...

[ThomPete]

You need to define skills first and how deep you are talking about.

Someone who are good a at multitude of things but very superficially does not make them more well rounded than one that practices on area more deeply. There are many many many areas that seem to be simple to learn because you can do them very quickly. But thats not what skills are about. Sure you can fake it, but unless you tried to dig deeper into something and learn what it means to learn then you aren't really going to be at a bigger advantage later on in life.

The very act of going deeper into a specific skill is teaching you something that just brushing over a wide area of skills isn't. In fact by going deeper into some of the typical things kids learn you are more likely to be able to also become better at others because you learn what it means to dig in rather than brush over.