What is knowledge? Is it facts someone else gives you either through spoken or written word, or is it thinking about those facts?

To think, one needs something to think about. To learn, one needs information one did not have previously. The best way to learn, in my opinion, is to have new information AND have that information be something one WANTS to think about.

Think about a time when someone tried to teach you something you didn't really care about at all. You probably had a lot of trouble learning whatever the parent/friend/teacher was trying to impart to you. Afterward, you probably remembered very little. You didn't want to spend your valuable time thinking about the "knowledge" shared with you because it just wasn't important to you at that particular time in your life.

To teach a child to learn and to teach a child to think, you need to give them material with which they can do both at the same time. Otherwise, they won't retain the knowledge. One of my pet peeves with many very simple books for new beginning readers is that the books themselves are just plain boring and uninteresting to the typical five or six-year old because the child's thinking skills are already beyond the scope of the book. If you go back and look at the basal readers used in schools a century ago, they contain more difficult words but much more interesting stories than currently used with new and beginning readers. These old books stimulated the child's desire to learn to read better so that they could understand everything in the story... because the story itself was interesting and, to the child of a certain age, worth thinking about.

No one can truly learn something they are not willing to think about. Thinking and learning go hand-in-hand. To learn something you don't want to think about is simply to memorize it. Once you have no need to know the information any longer, you will then forget it. It will no longer be part of you because it is not something you find worth thinking about.

In teaching children, you must remember to engage their imaginations so that they have the desire to learn what you are sharing. By giving a child something worth thinking about, you are stimulating both the child's thinking skills and his knowledge base. But you have to remember that the child, not you, is the judge of what is and is not worth learning about.