When we stare at everything with wonder and can’t wait (!) to find or learn something new, even the biggest problems lose their sting. Instead, they’re but challenges. Challenges that you’re already thinking about how to overcome. But our modern schooling system might not be the best way to keep this sense of curiosity because it tends to take independence away from kids instead of driving them to be self-sufficient learners and daring explorers.

In a previous interview with Bored Panda, the president of the nonprofit organization Let Grow, Lenore Skenazy, shared with us that modern schooling goes against the grain when it comes to how learning and teaching happened through much of human history.

“In the United States, for instance, school only became compulsory a little over 100 years ago. Previously—for hundreds of thousands of years of human history—kids learned simply by watching, copying, helping, and playing. In other words, they’d hang around the adults, see how they made things like baskets and arrowheads, they’d ask questions, noodle around, and try to copy what their elders were doing,” Lenore explained.

According to Lenore, kids would pitch in and help their families and communities as soon as they were able to. “They’d help out as soon as they could—fetching things, tracking animals, whatever—and in between they’d be playing with a group of mixed-age kids. All these activities were fueled by curiosity.”

“You were motivated to learn what the bigger kids in your group knew, too, because they were so cool. Your entire day consisted of observing and practicing the stuff you needed to know— skills and games. If you weren’t curious, you weren’t going to enjoy life, or succeed at it,” Lenore said that curiosity really was (and, in truth, still is) more important than we give it credit for.

“One reason kids might seem less curious today is because most of their education, inside and outside of school, doesn’t require self-motivation, it requires compliance. The drive is extrinsic, not intrinsic. Kids fill out worksheets because they have to, not because these seem interesting, or have any immediate connection to the ‘real’ world,” the expert noted that obedience alone won’t raise people who are full of the joys of discovery.

Meanwhile, extracurricular activities also appear to have fallen prey to the demands for compliance instead of encouraging kids to be curious. “Learning soccer means doing the drills the coach assigns, as opposed to tagging along with the older kids and working hard to get good enough so that they’d start letting you play. The key to curiosity, then, is giving kids enough free, unstructured time for them to find something they love to do for its own sake—not for a grade, or coach.”

In other words, we need to uncover in ourselves an inner drive to go out into the world and learn and find new and fascinating things. Some of which we’ll be more than happy to share with all the Pandas on the internet.