Ishmael Book 3. My Ishmael [1997, 1998] by Daniel Quinn

Author:Daniel Quinn [Quinn, Daniel]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bantam Books [hc, pbk]
Published: 1997-11-03T00:00:00+00:00

Ishmael asked if I'd watched any younger siblings grow up from infancy, and I told him no.

"Then you wouldn't know from experience that small children are the most powerful learning engines in the known universe. They effortlessly learn as many languages as are spoken in their households. No one has to sit them down in a classroom and drill them on grammar and vocabulary. They do no homework, they have no tests, no grades. Learning their native languages is no chore at all, because of course it's immensely and immediately useful and gratifying to them.

"Everything you learn during these early years is immensely and immediately useful and gratifying, even if it's only how to crawl or how to build a tower of blocks or how [Page 147] to bang a pot with a spoon or how to make your head buzz with a piercing screech. The learning of small children is limited only by what they're able to see, hear, smell, and get their hands on. This learning drive continues when they enter kindergarten, at least for a while. Do you remember the sort of things you learned in kindergarten?"

"No, I can't say that I do."

"These are things Rachel learned twenty years ago, but I doubt if they're any different nowadays. She learned the names of primary and secondary colors—red, blue, yellow, green, and so on. She learned the names of basic geometric shapes—square, circle, triangle. She learned how to tell time. She learned the days of the week. She learned to count. She learned the basic units of money—penny, nickel, dime, and so on. She learned the months and the seasons of the year. These are obviously things everyone would learn whether they studied them in school or not, but they're still somewhat useful and somewhat gratifying to know, so most children have no difficulty learning them in kindergarten. After reviewing all this in grade one, Rachel went on to learn addition and subtraction and to master beginning reading skills (though in fact she'd been reading since she was four years old at least). Again, children generally find these to be useful and gratifying studies. I don't intend to go through the entire curriculum in this way, however. The point I want to make is that, in grades K through three, most children master the skills that citizens need in order to get along in your culture, commonly characterized as the 'three R's'—reading, writing, and arithmetic. These are skills that, even at age seven and eight, children actually use and enjoy using. A hundred and fifty years ago this was the citizen's basic education. Grades four through twelve were added to the curriculum in order to keep youngsters off the job market, and the skills taught in these grades are the ones most students find to be neither useful in their lives nor gratifying to master. Addi- [Page 148] tion, subtraction, multiplication, and division of fractional numbers exemplify these skills. No children at all (and very, very few adults)

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