Parenting & Family Quote by Norton Juster

The most radical thing Norton Juster does here is make “learning” sound less like obedience and more like ignition. As an architect, he’s trained to think in structures: how a beam meets a column, how a hallway nudges you toward a room, how separate parts become one coherent space. That sensibility sits under the sentence. Kids don’t get excited because an adult declares a topic “important.” They get excited when knowledge stops arriving as isolated bricks and starts snapping into a livable building.

The intent is quietly corrective. Juster pushes back on the common adult fantasy that children are naturally distracted and must be hauled toward attention. His bet is the opposite: the problem isn’t curiosity, it’s compartmentalization. School often delivers facts in sealed containers - math at 10, history at 11 - and then wonders why students don’t feel the pulse. He’s describing the moment those walls thin out, when a child notices that fractions show up in music, that stories contain psychology, that maps are arguments. Connection becomes a reward system.

The subtext is also an argument about time. “Slowly” matters. Understanding isn’t a download; it’s accumulation plus recognition, the delayed click. That’s why the excitement “gets more and more” intense: once you experience the world as an interlocking set of patterns, you start looking for joins everywhere.

Coming from the author of The Phantom Tollbooth, this reads like a mission statement in plain clothes: wonder isn’t a separate subject. It’s what happens when knowledge finally behaves like a whole.