Some parents in Los Angeles recently enrolled their young children in a “weeklong boot camp designed to prepare them for the rigors of kindergarten.” The article opens with, “They [the children] could have been splashing in a pool or playing with their stuffed animals. But some local little ones had more serious work to do.”

And in the “stuff I just couldn’t make up” department, here’s the ad that appeared on the page.

Parents, you get to educate your kids however you see fit. But I hope that the parents enrolling their children in kindergarten boot camp aren’t doing so for fear that their kids will somehow end up trailing the competition for college 12 years from now. We’ve helped 8,000 kids get into college at Collegewise, including all of the most selective colleges in the country. But we’ve never once had to break the news to a family that they needed to lower their college sights because they just didn’t do enough back in the kindergarten years to get a competitive advantage.

Even the Marines don’t start boot camp in kindergarten.