That’s the main headline on the front of today’s evening paper. It means “4-year-olds learn numbers and letters”. Some kids in daycare are already learning letters and numbers, and if city councilman Torger Ødegaard gets his way, this will become standard practice.

I’m glad to see that some educators here are finally allowing kids’ natural interest in learning to blossom. Previously the attitude here has been that reading, writing, and arithmetic are too stressful subjects for kids. Kids should be allowed to be kids for as long as possible, which for some reason seems to mean that we shouldn’t be teaching them to read. It seems that skepics are afriad that too much structure will turn the kids off from learning. They see learning numbers and letters as “preparation for school”. In my opinion, it’s not preparation for school, it’s preparation for a life of curiosity and learning. The view that reading is something that occurs only in a pedagogical context is precisely the attitude that turns people off of what might otherwise be a lifelong love affair with books. This attitude makes me sad.

Thankfully, though, according to the newspaper, teaching kids to read in first grade is no longer seen as controversial. First graders here are seven, AFAIK–it’s just beyond me that teaching seven-year-olds to read was ever controversial!
I’ve never understood this Norwegian attitude, that reading and childhood somehow don’t mix. I started learning to read before I was three and had a grand old time with it. I just recently chatted online with my friend’s just-barely-four-year-old child. Granted, the chat didn’t consist of much more than “fox” or “pig”, but we both had fun. Kids are as smart as you allow them to be, and reading is only stressful if adults make it seem that way. I’m glad to see Norwegians publicly acknowledging that kids are interested in learning to read, and glad to see the school system developing in favor of this interest.

Speaking of “health nazism”, I’m noticing lately that health standards here in Norway are considerably more strict than they are in the US. Health standards–not weight standards. I had an appointment with a nutritionist the other day to discuss my high cholesterol and B12 deficiency. I went in prepared to be recommended a weight-loss diet, but it turned out that the nutritionist was happy to hear me say that I’m only interested in making changes to affect my health and not my weight, and that I do not have weight loss as a goal (the truth of that statement can be debated!). She had a strong HAES stance, something which I find is pretty common here. When she asked me about my exercise, I told her that I walk about three hours a week and do yoga twice a week. She said this was fine, but later in the conversation she said something like “Since you exercise so little…” I found that amusing, and a little frustrating, too. In the US, the amount of exercise I do would be considered pretty good, at least amongst my socioeconomic class. Here, I’m a lazy bum. It seems like here you’re expected to do a few hours of strenuous exercise a week to be considered fit. Health profiles ask how many hours a week you spend on exercise where you get out of breath and sweaty. That’s the standard here. When we went on a hike on summer vacation, my MIL explained to me that she’d chosen that particular hike for me because her friend with MS could do it–nice! I can walk all day, I’m strong as an ox, and I can do a backbend, but I’m not considered fit by a long shot.

These high health standards aren’t limited to exercise, either. After I went to the nutritionist, I decided to quit drinking so much coke because she suggested that my high sugar intake was the source of my high cholesterol, since nothing else in my diet could be causing it. I told my shrink about my decision to quit, and she praised me in a very patronizing way. She repeated “there are 25 sugar cubes in a glass of coke”–after all, stupid fat me, I thought it was health food! Good thing she enlightened me, otherwise I’d be brushing my teeth with the stuff! She expressed concern about my health, and fear that I’d get diabetes (science lesson, y’all: it’s a genetic disorder, and if you don’t have the gene, you won’t “get” it!). I reassured her, and mentioned that I’m drinking juice instead sometimes. She didn’t think that was any better. She seemed to think that juice is actually bad. Well, fuck that shit! People in this country have been majorly brainwashed by the Atkins empire. Juice is not bad. Juice does not have the same kind of “bad” sugar as coke. Juice has lots of nutritional value. No one, at least no one who’s not diabetic, needs to fear juice. Juice is healthy. People really need to chill out about sugar. I’m so sick of the catastrophizing associated with it!

The thing that makes me most angry is that none of these fearmongers seem to grasp the importance of depression when it comes to health. It’s not sugar that’s going to kill me. I’ll probably die from cardiovascular disease brought on from the stress that depression causes my body. When I’m depressed, I have almost no chance of doing things that are healthy for my body. It seems rational to me to get rid of the depression so I can do healthy things instead of harping at me for not doing the healthy things when my depression makes them nigh on impossible. My depression is going to kill me way before anything else does, not to mention that it completely destroys my quality of life here and now. IMO, stressing out about sugar or my activity level is asinine. Stress is the last thing I need. I wish I could make the people close to me understand this issue.