Sublime

Surrounded by more than a thousand books and guided by our mother’s one mantra, to love learning, we saw the beauty of what could be known. “Take control of your education,” she would say, “no one is spoon-feeding you. Figure out what you want to know and then figure out how to learn it.”

If one knows how to formulate penetrating questions and assiduously seek answers, education, with or without schools, is inevitable.

case-in-point teaching also shifts the locus of action from the teacher to the group—from the individual to the system and the issues at stake. This mode of teaching reveals the multifaceted role in the social system of the teacher, who is at once a teacher giving access to key ideas and frameworks, an authority maintaining equilibrium in the group

At birth, infants possess a rich set of core skills and knowledge. Object concepts, number sense, a knack for languages, knowledge of people and their intentions . . . so many brain modules are already present in young children, and these foundational skills will later be recycled in physics, mathematics, language, and philosophy classes.