I recently saw a documentary which compared human and animal intelligence. The researchers showed some orangutans how to get a piece of candy out of a complicated box. It took a series of steps and, in order to test the primates’ intelligence, they included a few unnecessary actions (like poking the box three times with a stick). The orangutans soon skipped the irrelevant steps in order to get right to the treat, but the kids who were shown the box didn’t. Are kids less intelligent than the primates?

The researchers’ conclusion wasn’t so surprising: the children aren’t less smart, they just expect to be taught. Among many other differences, what separate us from our closest relatives is this predisposition to learn from others, especially adults. It’s not  simple imitation, but trust and willingness to work with adults who can show you useful things. I believe that this predisposition doesn’t disappear as the child grows, despite the fact that he becomes more and more aware and selective about what he learns.

But I do believe that traditional schooling ruins it systematically. Everything,  from poorly educated and uninterested teachers to all the boring and old information in the curricula, seems to be thought through as though we wanted to quench any sign of natural curiosity and pleasure to learn. I inevitably ask myself: why do we choose to destroy the very things that would make our lives so much easier? And how do we go about losing kids’ respect and interest in knowledge?

As difficult as it may be for some people to believe, all kids want form the stuff they learn is for it to be useful in every day life. Like all the adults, kids hate having to spend their time on irrelevant things, all the while missing the important ones. However, giving them useful information would not suffice. Kids need, above all else, freedom and choice.

If we listened to them and trusted them, we would see that they know best what would benefit them and what is relevant for themselves.  It’s time we understood that their interest in their own life is at least as high as our desire to help them. If we’ll give them the freedom to chose, we’ll see that they  become responsible for their own development, that they can make the right choices and they can and want to learn, without being constantly pushed from behind or threatened.

And besides, does our desire to help them justify our control over their learning?

Next to the right to life itself, the most fundamental of all human rights is the right to control our own minds and thoughts. That means, the right to decide for ourselves how we will explore the world around us, think about our own and other persons’ experiences, and find and make the meaning of our own lives. Whoever takes that right away from us, as the educators do, attacks the very center of our being and does us a most profound and lasting injury. He tells us, in effect, that we cannot be trusted even to think, that for all our lives we must depend on others to tell us the meaning of our world and our lives, and that any meaning we may make for ourselves, out of our own experience, has no value. John Holt – Instead of education: Ways to Help People Do Things Better