Falling in love

Kathy at the Creating Passionate Users blog believes most classroom learning sucks. Reflecting on her daughter's early Montessori education, Kathy concluded that classroom learning that doesn't suck:

…took the time to discover what the kids were passionate about, and used that as a vehicle for motivation.

Paul Graham suggests in this undelivered graduation speech (via Gwen) that in this context a better word than passion is curiosity since "Curiosity turns work into play."

Playfulness is celebrated in this Guardian column written by Philip Pullman (via Jean Burgess). Pullman has some serious advice for our education system:

The confidence to do this [to question], the happy and open curiosity about the world that results from it, can develop only in an atmosphere free from the drilling and testing and examining and correcting and measuring and ranking in tables that characterises so much of the government's approach, the "common sense" attitude to education.

Advice with which, as Jeremy points out, many edu-bloggers agree. Indeed, as Pullman so eloquently closes:

True education flowers at the point when delight falls in love with responsibility.

I have to pin that to my noticeboard!