[Noozhawk’s note: One in a periodic series on reforming education.]

I started to write this when my grandson, Andres, was 9 months old. He was in a little kiddie seat that had legs and rollers, so he could scoot around the floor.

He couldn’t walk yet, but he could navigate himself around, touching whatever he could.

He needs to inspect everything. He learns through touching, grasping or manipulating whatever he can.

He also learns, obviously, through sight. His eyes are big, open, bright.

He gazes at everything. He tries to take in as much as he can. He studies whatever is in his eyesight, focusing where he can:

What’s that? What’s that? How is that related to that? Big wide eyes, vacuuming in everything.

Now that he has learned to walk, his explorations, searches and learning know no bounds! If I am lucky, I see him once a month.

At 14 months he is walking. We stroll in front of the house. There is a curb. He knows it is dangerous but wants to go down.

He kneels down backward and reaches back with one foot, feeling the side of the curb with the tops of his toes, reaching a little lower and lower downward, inch by inch, searching for the bottom.

Every time I see him, he teaches me about learning! Of course, hardly any words exist for him yet, but he explores with seeing, sound, touch all the time. He just wants to take in, take in, take in.

That’s what learning is: the natural desire to know, understand, negotiate and play in this playground we live in. Nobody has to teach him that. He teaches us that.

Back when I taught high school English (more than a half-century ago!), I remember an article title that said something like: “The most difficult task of teachers is to teach children to want to learn!”

That’s absurd! It is a fundamental, natural desire we all have — to learn! It is unstoppable.

So, what’s the problem? School slips and slides away from tapping into that natural desire we all have to learn, and more and more into fulfilling the requirements of the “educational-industrial complex” (a phrase President Ike and I invented).

We force children to learn what the teacher wants them to learn, because the principals want the teachers to do this, because the school boards want the principals to, because “curricula” demand it. (I do get carried away!)

My experience has been that, to a large extent, schools shift away from assisting children in their natural desire to learn, and to doing what adults from the past two or 20 or 200 generations say they need to know.

This seems to be corroborated in the nearby video by Noam Chomsky. He says there are two purposes of education: 

• The traditional concept that comes from the Enlightenment is to inquire, to create, to observe the riches of the past and try to internalize the parts that are significant to us — and to carry on that quest in our own way according to our own interests.
• The second concept is essentially “indoctrination” of the young. That is, the student must learn doctrines that have come down to us from the past. The doctrines of (sins of?) the fathers are visited upon new generations.

Should we assist children in pursuing what they want to know or what we want them to know? I say both, but No. 1 is, by far, our most important responsibility.

It’s not that there aren’t thousands, millions, of dedicated teachers out there trying to do this, but “the system” seems to cripple our natural instincts.

I hope Andres has two or three teachers, at least, during his schooling career who facilitate his natural desire to know, to learn, to experiment, to search.

Imagine if a whole faculty, a whole school board, a whole school system, a whole community, a whole planet were committed to this for every student!

What would it take? Here’s an idea: Let’s ask the students!