Almost every child, on the first day he sets foot in a school building, is smarter, more
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, less afraid of what he doesn"t know. better at finding and
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, more confident,
resourceful
(机敏的), persistent and
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than he will ever be again in his schooling—or, unless he is very unusual and very lucky, for the rest of his life. Already, by paying close attention to and
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the world and people around him, and without any school-type formal instruction, he has done a task far more difficult, complicated and
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than anything he will be asked to do in school, or than any of his teachers has done for years. He has solved the
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of language. He has discovered it—babies don"t even know that language exists—and he has found out how it works and learnt to use it
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. He has done it by exploring, by experimenting, by developing his own model of the grammar of language, by
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and seeing whether it works by gradually changing it and
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it until it does work. And while he has been doing this, he has been learning other things as well, including many of the "
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" that the schools think only they can teach him, and many that are more complicated than the ones they do try to teach him.