Jon's Unschooling Page

Britain has produced a range of remarkably gifted multidisciplinary scientists and scholars who are sometimes described as polymaths. The group included, in recent times, Bertrand Russell, A. N. Whitehead, J. B. S. Haldane, J. D. Bernal, and Jacob Bronowski. Russell commented that the development of such gifted individuals required a childhood period in which there was little or no pressure for conformity, a time in which the child could develop and pursue his or her own interests no matter how unusual or bizzare. Because of the strong pressures for social conformity both by the government and by peer groups in the United States -- and even more so in the Soviet Union, Japan, and the People's Republic of China -- I think that such countries are producing proportionately fewer polymaths ....

Particularly today, when so many difficult and complex problems face the human species, the development of broad and powerful thinking is desperately needed. There should be a way...to encourage, in a humane and caring context, the intellectual development of especially promising youngsters. Instead we find, in the instructional and examination systems of most of these countries, an almost reptilian ritualization of the educational process ....

- Carl Sagan, The Dragons of Eden (Ballantine, 1977)