Reinforcing the fact that I have no connection with Kumon other than experiencing it's astonishing impact on my two daughters' life I have another inspiring story to relate.
My sincere apologies also to everyone who is bored with this topic!
I met a profoundly deaf girl recently and while chatting to her about various aspects of schooling discovered to my deep sadness how incredibly difficult life is for deaf people. Hardly any go to university because of the enormous challenges it presents. She lost her hearing through a bout of meningitis when she was little affecting not only her hearing (total loss) but also her balance.
Her courageous parents fought for her and got her onto a program in which she was fitted with a cochlear implant. My naive understanding was that everything is alright after that. However, apparently this gives a patient a crude equivalent of about 0.07% of the noise channels of a normal person. I have heard the simulated effect and consider it to be inaudible. As I understand it we have about 30,000 audio channels taking sound info to our brain. Cochlear implants provide around 50! So my guess is they get less than 1% of the sound information that hearing people do. Please note I am no expert.
Years of speech therapy and listening training follows as loads of brain power is diverted to interpret these crude noises and enable the patient to at least have a conversation on a 1 to 1 basis in a quiet environment provided the companion does not bounce randomly between different subjects.
She speaks beautifully with a few, sometimes embarrassing, faults. It is heartbreaking to witness how much she has fought to do things I take for granted.
As with my daughters she also had wonderful professionals of all sorts of skill helping her along the way (I am, of course, referring to our wonderful teachers, medical staff, sports coaches and many others doing there very best to help all our children.
And quite spontaneously she started to relate how one particular programme transformed her confidence in her own ability to learn in general as well as her ability to do maths. The program was Kumon. In her words it took her a year to go from being two years behind to being 2 years ahead of her class and she also noted that being ahead didn't lead to boredom but meant that she could learn new and exciting things that her excellent school teacher could challenge her with as well as further reinforce her learning by participating more in helping classmates (as, of course, they would help her).
With the wonderful support of many professionals and through her own indomitable spirit she successfully graduated from university now.
All of these people contributed to her progress but their is no doubt that Kumon played a key, transformational part in her progress.
I don't want hard pressed parents to feel it is in anyway mandatory and it is important to recognise that the experience is a bad one for many children. My own niece hates it and I fully acknowledge that individual experiences with it can be damaging.
However that is no reason to unconditionally trash it and prevent many children from experiencing its magic.
My own recommendation is to proceed very gently with it and if your children do not catch a bug of excitement with it, then drop it. For example, we could go for a week without doing any Kumon because the girls were tired or busy with projects and other stuff. Although we encouraged it and set aside a time for it, their mental 'courage' on a daily basis was more important and it was never mandatory. And you could see them catching the sort of excitement that they also got from playing things like tamagotchi when they did get into the rhythm of it. An excitement that comes from instant positive reinforcement based on real achievement.