An Educational Manifesto

Every child has the right to be exposed to multiple fields of knowledge.

Every child of normal intelligence has a natural appetite for this kind of knowledge.

This appetite, or natural desire, is all a child needs to motivate him/her to do his/her lessons, if the knowledge is presented properly.

The desire to learn is destroyed in four ways:

1. Too much talking at the child, offering diluted knowledge without giving the child time and space to reflect and digest that knowledge.
2. Lectures that are assembled, arranged and illustrated from different sources by the teacher.  These lessons do not actively engage the child, but offer knowledge that is so condensed and well-packaged that the child is not required to think about it, and thus does not assimilate it.
3. Textbooks that compress, filter and recompress knowledge until the original living ideas become sawdust, disconnected from the minds in which they originated.
4. The use of competition and striving for achievement as incentives to do lessons, instead of the natural hunger and love for knowledge that are all a child needs in order to learn.

Children learn best from real, tangible things, and books. Tangible things include:

1. Natural structures for physical activity like climbing, swimming, walking, etc.
2. Resources for working and building with, such as wood, leather or clay.
3. Natural objects in their native habitat - birds, plants, rivers, stones, etc.
4. Works of art.
5. Scientific instruments.

Most people readily acknowledge the need for tangible things in learning - 'hands-on' education - but intellectual education has to come from books.

Every student should enjoy studying their own books from each of their subjects, and these books should represent a wide curriculum.  By freely using books, the mechanical difficulties of education (reading, spelling, composition, etc.) virtually disappear, and lessons become 'enjoyable; able to enhance the individual and give him the ability he needs for life'.