Let children learn to think for themselves

Every human at some point in his or her lives has loved learning. From the tender age of three or four, we go through this phase of questioning how everything is, and why things work the way they do. For example, “Why is the sky blue”, “How do cars work?” . Why is it that as we grow older, we lose this inquisitive nature?
One of the issues I faced, as a child, was that people always tried to limit how much I was allowed to learn based solely on my age. It was assumed that because I fell into a certain age group I would be unable to comprehend anything higher than the knowledge typically associated with that age range. If I questioned something, I would be met with unsatisfying answers such as, “You don’t need to know that”, or “You wouldn’t understand this”, and while, perhaps both of these may have been true, they were quite annoying to receive. I would have been much more content if someone had tried to explain to me as simply as they could the answers to my questions, or even encouraged me to do more research myself, giving me hints as to what I should look up. Yet, very few people go through the trouble of doing this.
Time after time, people accuse the school system of teaching children what to think, of producing students who can only “regurgitate”, but maybe the reason for this is that within schools (and even at home), we don’t encourage students to think about their course material any further than what is provided. It is sort of like children are told something is a fact, and not taught to question why it is a fact, because they could not possibly understand the reason it is factual. Because of this, students lose their passion for learning. They are no longer learning because they wish to understand how the world works, but because they have to write an exam and this is what is required to do so. As a result, we get children who can tell you exactly what the textbook says, but probably not much more.
This is not necessarily bad for exam pass rates, because if students adhere strictly to syllabi and can answer the questions perfectly, they are bound to pass. However, on the other hand, what effect does it have on the child? They no longer view learning as this amazing experience: a way to discover new things, but rather as a job, a chore, or something that they are forced to do. They don’t care about the things they are learning, and so find no enjoyment from them. One of the best things I think we can do is enable our children to think for themselves. We should encourage them to read books that might be a little difficult for a child at their age, encourage them to learn about sophisticated topics such as politics and social illnesses, so that they can begin to form their own opinions, and we should encourage them to keep asking questions by always providing them with fulfilling answers.