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1 CHAPTER ONE The Purpose of Education : Introducing Incredible Kids to an Amazing World It is nothing short of a miracle that modern methods of instruction have not yet entirely strangled the holy curiosity of inquiry. —Albert Einstein1 OK, here’s what I don’t understand. On the one hand, you have the child, this incredible being who has been equipped by natural selection over the course of hundreds of thousands and even millions of years to be a curi- ous, passionate learner. There’s plenty of support for this view. Nuclear physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer once said, “There are children playing in the streets who could solve some of my top problems in physics, because they have modes of sensory perception that I lost long ago.”2 Neuroscien- tist Marian Diamond wrote, “The energy use in a two-year-old [brain] is equal to an adult’s. And then, the levels keep right on rising until, by age three, the child’s brain is twice as active as an adult’s.”3 Harvard paleon- tologist Stephen Jay Gould believed that the key evolutionary advantage of Homo sapiens was neoteny, that is, the retention of childlike characteris- tics like flexibility and curiosity into adulthood.4 Also keep in mind that children regularly learn the most complicated symbol system in the world, their own spoken language, without anyone directly teaching it to them. In some cases, they’ve created totally new languages!5 So I think I’m pretty