Thank you for sharing David Stein’s article. The question is a good one.
I recently had a discussion with a Yeshiva student who spent most of his life learning at Zilberman (where they start with Breishit and continue in order over the years at the yeshiva) and then switched to Mir in the past few years. I wanted to know what he thought the positive and negative affects of this type of learning had on him, especially given he was now learning in a yeshiva with a completely different style.
He told me that one of the positive aspects of this method of learning was that he only started learning Talmud at 14/15 when he was cognitively ready to process the structure of learning gemara, to understand that there was a question. Earlier he gained facility with material, a love of learning, and curiosity. It was also interesting to note that clearly not all the students excelled at the yeshiva, but they all seemed to benefit from the delay (in his opinion.)
I thought this was an interesting point. Perhaps starting talmud in 4-6th is too early, given where children are at cognitively, and this keeps many students from enjoying learning. This may also be the case with mishnah. This also seems to fit with Bruner’s approach.
Personally, I was thinking about this as a parent thinking about schools for my kids as well as evaluating whether learning mishnayot with my daughter at age 9 is the best choice of a parent/child chavruta given the difficulty of some of the terminology and concepts.
Meira
Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 01/19/2017 09:20AM by mlb.
