Protecting Your Child’s Love Of Learning

Sometimes for parents who see their children come home from public school angry and antagonistic to school work and learning, we naturally assume that it is against the nature of a child to want to learn anything. But if you think back to the years before you sent your little one off to school, the opposite was the case. As an infant, your child was a virtually learning machine and he or she seemed to live and breathe learning new things. That natural curiosity and desire to find out more about the world was as deeply a part of your little one’s being as the desire for food and love.

So what happened? Does the love of learning die out when a child passes out of infancy? Actually, if you watch your young child or teenager closely, the love of learning is still there. But what has happened is because public schools destroy the zeal for learning at an academic level, children channel their enthusiasm for learning into venues that understand the mind of youth better than schools do it seems. That is why video games and television are so successful. It isn’t that these tools of communication succeed just because the things they talk about are fun. They succeed because they nurture and encourage a love of exploration and learning in ways the public schools long ago forgot (or never knew) how to do.

There is a tragic paradox to public school. The paradox is that they are charged with the highest calling in society which is to educate our youth. When we turn our children over to them, they have a tremendous opportunity to capture that zeal for learning and take it year by year forward so the child never ceases being fascinated by knowledge and the love of gaining more of it.

But sadly, almost without exception, public schools squander this golden opportunity to take young minds brimming with the thrill of learning and take them further and further never damaging the precious enthusiasm they have for knowing new things. Instead, within a short time after starting public school, your child will lose his or her love of learning and become angry, bitter and resentful of the school and of you for sending him there.

Part of the reason for this failure comes from the fact that public schools by law must handle a huge amount of children. So to maintain order, extensive crowd control and discipline systems are put in place. Somewhere along the way, schools abandon their core principle which is to teach young minds and to nurture their love of knowledge and they exchange that for order, discipline and the ability to follow rules.

Children are not stupid. They can see that the institution is not at all interested in academics and is all about order and keeping everybody marching in a line and they turn against the school. But then the schools even rob the classroom of time to subject children to hour after hour of “ethical training” in anti drug, anti sex and anti discrimination assemblies and lesson plans.

Somewhere along the way, someone saw that schools represent an unsupervised concentration of children who had time that could be monopolized to preach an ethical lesson to them. By unsupervised we mean that the parents aren’t there to object. So large segments of the school day are wasted on teaching the children to be good citizens, moral people and to have “self esteem” which has only become damaged because the schools destroyed the children’s love of learning in the first place.

Whether or not public schools can see how badly they have failed in their prime reason for existing or not isn’t your problem as a parent. Your problem is to find a place that can rekindle the love of learning in your child and begin to move him or her along toward academic excellence so your little one knows the joy of knowledge and the thrill of excelling at learning again. The deep desire of parents to make this type of education available to their kids is the reason for the explosion of the private school movement in the last few decades. And is a movement that may become a wholesale revolution if public schools continue to destroy the minds and souls of the children they are supposed to be teaching.