They were right—although I had to see it for myself before I fully grasped the magnitude of the phenomenon—children are learning machines, more or less in the same sense that sharks are eating machines.

The only phenomenon more astonishing than that is the way the public school system manages to kick, stomp, and crush a child's inherent curiosity and love of learning, often destroying it altogether by the third or fourth grade. Yes, children are learning machines. The fact that government schools have managed to condition them against learning is an astonishing—if wholly negative—feat, achieved at the unspeakable cost of countless hundreds of billions of dollars.