Ethnocentric; inaccurate; encourages thinking inside the boxAlthough there were certainly some exercises in this book that encouraged reasoning, many of them did not teach what I would consider logic, but rather they seemed to encourage finding a right answer. This is actually not something I feel a need to teach my child at this time–she will get plenty of that in school. I would rather teach her to think critically at this age. For example, in the pattern recognition section, there are actually multiple correct answers to most of the patterns. Teaching children that there is one correct answer in these types of exercises can lead to implicit bias, something I have to work very to get my sophomore and junior level university students to understand. The think they “know” the right answer before conducting an experiment to test an hypothesis (in part because the idea of a single right answer has been pounded into them from an early age!). Second, there were multiple inaccuracies in the book, such as an inaccurate representation of a peacock chick (which my 3 year old quickly pointed out). Additionally, neither my child nor I understood what the book was getting at with the real/pretend pages. Children are expected to say that a football player throwing a toaster, a football player riding a bike, two girls carrying a rowing scull (which is oddly chopped in half?) and a boy drumming on a pumpkin are all pretend. I think Kumon needs to look up the definition of pretend. Each of these things can and DO happen, so by definition are not pretend. We drummed on pumpkins in music class. Two women can easily carry a rowing scull. A football player could ride a bike. Finally, I found it to be ethnocentric. For example, there are multiple references to hot dogs, football, televisions, and the like.
