Most six-year-olds can't wait to go to school on that first day
in September. It's a sign of coming of age. They get to go to
school like the big kids. For an alarmingly large number of
these children, however, boredom, anxiety, and fear of learning
quickly set in. This happens because societies build schools
that achieve much less than they promise, are frustrating for
students, and generally fail to help children become adults who
can think for themselves. Education has always been considered
to be a process whereby some essential body of knowledge is
transmitted to students; schools have simply been places where
that transmission officially takes place. The development of
flexible, inquiring minds has rarely been the primary
consideration in the design of educational systems. Making
students into proper members of society has usually been of much
greater concern than developing students who are creative
thinkers. Today, the level of dissatisfaction and even outright
anger at the educational system is treme