I started school

very young. I went in and out of school when my mother was doing relief teaching work and then began full-time at the age of four.
On relief days I would be put into the class where the youngest children were being taught. I was expected to behave in just the same way they did even when I was just two or three. The Senior Cat was teaching further up the school and remembers the country children as being generally extremely well behaved. Was I the same? I don't know.
I don't think going to school early did me any harm. I wasn't particularly fond of school at any time. I was often in trouble for reading "under the desk".
In my kittenhood you had to turn five in the year you started school or you could start the next year if your birthday was late in the year. My birthday comes at the very end of the year. I could, quite legally and legitimately, have started school the following year but my mother was only too pleased to have me out of the house. There were two more young children at home. I think that was part of the problem.
And, oh dear, I could already read. I assumed everyone else could read too. I had seen them learning to read at school but it did not occur to me that they might not actually be able to read. I had not associated the process with not being able to read.
I am not sure what I expected to happen when I started going to school on a more permanent basis. Did I expect it to be more exciting or, at very least, more interesting? If so, I was disappointed. I was an old hand at school. I had, unconsciously or subconsciously, managed to learn a good deal from my days in the classroom. I knew what to expect. Read did I say? I could read. I could spell the words for my daily sentence in my "diary" and I wanted to write much more. I could do the arithmetic, both written and "mental". I knew a lot of the things we were supposed to be taught in "social studies" and "nature science". I was bored.
My parents were offered the opportunity of allowing me to skip a grade. I suspect I was a nuisance in the classroom and this was the only way the school could see of handling the situation. I moved up and on and I was still largely bored and only a little more challenged. I don't think I was a brilliant student but, well I could read - and I did read.
There are discussions now about when children should start school. When are they ready for it? Australian children tend to start school early - anything from four and a half years of age to six. European children might leave it until they are seven - but their pre-school system is different. It depends on which state you live in. It's a ridiculous situation. I once spent a week as a relief teacher in a school in Calgary. It was the very beginning of the school year. The children were tested to see if they could recognise the letters of the alphabet, could count and so on. Some of them had the beginnings of reading. Others did not. Fortunately for me the education office there finally found a relief teacher for the one who had been rushed off with appendicitis and I went back to doing the research I had gone to do. I no longer had to worry about teaching children in a foreign country basic reading skills.
My own view is that when most children are ready to read they are also ready to start school. There are exceptions of  course but it is being ready to learn to read that matters. If you can read then you can learn anything else you want to learn. The problem is that with all that modern technology around we seem to have forgotten about the importance of being able to read, really read. Our local library seems to have a great quantity of "graphic novels" - for adults as well as children. Yes, it is reading of a sort but graphic novels are not the novels of my childhood or the books on the fiction shelves.
And the other concern is that it seems more people have problems following instructions. They can't read a pattern. There is an otherwise lovely piece of work on display at the show grounds. It won't win a prize  because there is an obvious flaw in it that spoils the piece and means it cannot even be used. Someone was apparently unable to read the instructions or "read" their work.
It just seems sad to have all that effort wasted because you can't read.