Recently, it seems that my mind keeps drifting back to the brilliant insights of visionary, George B. Leonard, author of Education and Ecstasy.

He suggests three basic assumptions which I deeply believe are true but are generally unknown and unacknowledged by most of the population:

1. The human potential is infinitely greater than we have been led to believe.

2. Learning is sheer delight (when not devoid of the ecstatic moment).

3. Learning itself is life’s ultimate purpose.

“What we fail to acknowledge, Leonard states,  is that every child starts out as an Archimedes, a Handel, a Nietzsche.  The eight-month-old who succeeds in balancing one block on another has made a connection no less momentous for him than Nietzsche’s.”

And then Leonard quotes Einstein: “It is in fact nothing short of a miracle that the modern methods of instruction have not yet entirely strangled the holy curiosity of inquiry. . . It is a very grave mistake to think that the enjoyment of seeing and searching can be promoted by means of coercion and a sense of duty.”

Leonard then penned these beautiful and powerful words, which perhaps  speak to me deeply after weeks in a frozen landscape:

“And yet, life and joy cannot be subdued.  The blade of grass shatters the concrete.  The spring flowers bloom in Hiroshima. . . ”