>I agree with your THIRST TO LEARN theory. I feel parents are still the best educational resource children have ...
My current worry about my own children is that they aren't thirsty to learn. In fact they are "all museum-ed out". When they were younger they had so much cultural education that now they just want to shop and "chill out". They thought that all trains ran on steam, all steets were cobbled, the Vikings were around just a few years ago ...
My daughter's teacher asked if anyone had been to an art gallery. "Yes," yawned my eldest "the Tate, Tate Modern in London, the Musee d'Orsay in Paris, the Miro and Picasso museums in Barcelona, ... endless Museums of Modern Art, yawn, yawn". She didn't ask again!
Give me adults any day! I wonder if you only start appreciating things when you escape formal education. I'm sure that I took the line of least resistance to good exam results, rather than subjects that actually interested me. Tertiary education (in maths) was, wastefully, just clocking up another paper qualification, rather than making any great discoveries They do say that history and English as subjects are wasted on the young. So many subjects come alive once you get to make your own choices of how you spend your time. I just hope I don't exhaust my own children before they get to that stage!
