Starting school at three years of age

is the latest in the electioneering topics to come out. 
The current Premier is touting this as a "good thing". It will apparently raise the NAPLAN results by four months in year three of the primary school.
Quite how they know this I am not sure. I would be suspicious of any research which suggested it. 
I am not sure where the line should be drawn either. If three years of age, why not two years of age? Why not start the one year old child? Perhaps you could even start children at school at birth?
It seems to me that the idea of starting children at school at the age of three is not about the well being of the child but about the desired achievements of the child in a narrow range of activities. Of course the activities aimed at three year old children are supposedly aimed at ensuring they are ready to start more formal learning at age five. 
The activities are not about any of the things that Jack Ma was talking about in that video clip I mentioned a couple of days ago. These activities are not about music, art, or drama. They are not creative activities designed to stimulate a child's imagination. The activities are about making sure they know their numbers and can count, that they know their letters and can read. They are about being familiar with a screen and a keyboard and being able to respond to an instruction given by a computer program. Yes, all those things are important. 
There were no computers in schools or preschool or kindergarten when I was a child. "Kindy" was supposed to be fun. It was about learning to play with other children, about listening to a story, singing songs, splashing paint on paper and other similar activities. I wasn't actually too keen on "kindy" and I am not sure I managed to learn much there. A lot of other children never went at all. They learned to "socialise" by playing with the neighbour's children. They painted with mud in the back garden and listened to a kindergarten program on the radio. Their mothers taught them nursery rhymes and many of them had a bedtime story. They discovered physics in the sand pit and chemistry in the kitchen. Many of them had discovered "nature science" through the vegetable garden . Most of them could read their names and tie their shoe laces before they went to school.They might not have known everything they "needed" to know but they were not considered "backward" or in need of remedial help unless they failed to pick it up at all - and most of us just absorbed what we needed to know quite naturally as we were being taught other things.
Now it seems you need to be consciously taught everything - and taught it in a certain way.  Nothing can be left to chance. If a child does not know something then they might fail to reach the desired level on the NAPLAN tests - and that reflects badly on the teacher and the school. 
It seems it isn't really about "child-centred" learning. It's about passing that test, about being competitive and learning to cope with stress. 
I just think that three year old children are a bit young for all that.