Holt: Human Nature 2

Human beings are born intelligent.  We are by nature question-asking, answer-making problem-solving animals, and we are extremely good at it, above all when we are little. But under certain conditions, which may exist anywhere and certainly exist almost all of the time in almost all schools, we stop using our greatest intellectual powers, stop wanting to use them, even stop believing that we have them.

-John Holt, from How Children Fail