We have considered several examples of naïve questioning:

• Where does the sun go at night? And how can the moon reflect the sun’s light when it’s not even there at night?
• Are rocks alive and do plants move?
• How long before my keys land in the clouds?
• How can an equation be true, if it’s never actually been the case?
• How could the atom, which was invented (because it could not be discovered), have become an object?

By asking these questions we move to the heart of what the material is really saying about the world we live in.  It pushes students to make sense of things, allowing them to exercise their critical judgement, just as when Calvin said to his father ‘Yes, but if the sun spends the night in Arizona, how come it rises in the East?’

It is possible to see the role of education as providing basic skills and basic facts; but that is not what we would suggest.  Instead, we should jump right in.  In math and the sciences we should expose children to the beauties of nature, its wonders, and most especially its puzzles.  We need to listen to their questions and their musings, tease out their notions, and explore and test them.  From butterflies to dinosaurs to building with blocks, students should explore and examine, conjecture, compare, take measure, draw and draw conclusions. That is very different from the passive witnessing of material that too often marks our work.

Let me close by going back to ancient Greece for a moment.  The Greek word “physis” is the root of such words as physics and physicians.  “Physis,” it turns out, was an agricultural term referring to the internal push of a plant as it breaks through the soil.  There was a corresponding word in Latin, “natura,” again referring to the push of a seedling breaking through the soil and asserting its place in the scheme of things.  To seek the nature of things was thus to seek their internal push, what made them what they are.  We preserve this vital sense when we speak of someone’s nature in explaining their behavior.  It is, I believe, just this push we cultivate when we teach our children the right way:  a growing sense for their own voice, for the story they can tell of how the world came to be the way it is and how it works.