  There is an ancient maxim that states, “Teach them correct principles and they will govern themselves.” While this adage is devoted primarily to moral and ethical principles, it may be applied beyond.
Another similar axiom states, “Feed a man a fish, and he will eat for a day, teach him to fish and he will feed for a lifetime.” Both adages are rooted in the notion of the existence of “universal” truths that intersect all knowledge (e.g., the scientific process as means to solve problems). Individuals who acquire skills and knowledge (i.e., become literate) begin to “see the whole schema” and “know how to navigate its system.” In the end, those individuals are “set free” or rather released from “external governance” exercising “free will” within the confines of culture and society. Anyone who labors to instruct seeks to help individuals locate the “inner locus of control,” i.e., the will to learn.
Thus, teaching is as much a matter of tapping into the interest and natural ability of a learner and deepening their knowledge as a means to engage their will to learn as it is a matter of broadening their horizons. According to urlLink John Taylor Gatto (go to article), schooling merely “dumbs down” human potential by keeping individuals from “growing up.” Hmmm…Critics of education find it easier to disparage schooling practices than to find solutions… First, though, we must wake up to what our schools really are: laboratories of experimentation on young minds, drill centers for the habits and attitudes that corporate society demands.
Mandatory education serves children only incidentally; its real purpose is to turn them into servants. Don't let your own have their childhoods extended, not even for a day. If David Farragut could take command of a captured British warship as a pre-teen, if Thomas Edison could publish a broadsheet at the age of twelve, if Ben Franklin could apprentice himself to a printer at the same age (then put himself through a course of study that would choke a Yale senior today), there's no telling what your own kids could do.
After a long life, and thirty years in the public school trenches, I've concluded that genius is as common as dirt. We suppress our genius only because we haven't yet figured out how to manage a population of educated men and women. The solution, I think, is simple and glorious. Let them manage themselves. (Harper's, Sept 2003) 
