How delightful to read film-maker Sam Firth’s wise and telling comments on the highly questionable modern fashion of bombarding young children with questions to allegedly “extend” their thinking and accelerate their “metacognitive capacities” (“Ours is not always to reason why”, 29 June). She is so right in saying that: “If you question an idea before it is fully formulated it blocks the creative process.” Yet, tragically, these are the very kinds of inappropriate pedagogical practices that are enshrined in England’s statutory Early Years Foundation Stage curriculum, and which are responsible for dragging young children out of their unselfconscious reverie and imaginative worlds in a totally unnecessary, and even damaging, way.

Richard House, Research Centre for Therapeutic Education, University of Roehampton.