Almost every child, on the first day he sets foot in a school building, is smarter, more curious, less afraid of what he doesn't know, better at finding and figuring things out, more confident, resourceful, persistent and independent, than he will ever be again in his schooling or, unless he is very unusual and very lucky, for the rest of his life.
几乎每个孩子，在上学的第一天，比之日后的求学中更善于发现和解决问题；或者在日后的人生中，表现得更聪明、好奇、无惧未知、有自信、有才智、有毅力、有主见，除非他极为出众且极为幸运。
Already, by paying close attention to and interacting with the world and people around him, and without any school-type formal instruction, he has done a task far more difficult, complicated and abstract than any thing he will be asked to do in school, or than any of his teachers has done for years.
在没有学校正式指导的情况下，通过对环境和周围人的仔细观察和互动，他已经完成了一项比学校要求或比任何老师多年试验下，更为困难、复杂和抽象的任务。
He has solved the mystery of language.
他揭开了语言的秘密。
He has discovered it - babies don't even know that language exists - and he has found out how it works and learnt to use it appropriately.
婴儿甚至不知道语言的存在，但他已经知道语言是如何发挥作用并且学会了正确的使用语言。
He has done it by exploring, by experimenting, by developing his own model of the grammar of language, by trying it out and seeing whether it works, by gradually changing it and refining it until it does work.
他通过探索、实验和发展自己的语法模式并对其进行试用来检验是否有效，逐渐改进和完善直到它生效。
And while he has been doing this, he has been learning other things as well, including many of the concepts that the schools think only they can teach him, and many that are more complicated than the ones they do try to teach him.
在掌握这门语言的过程中，他也在学习其他的事物。包括许多学校认为只有他们能教的知识，以及许多比学校所教的更为复杂的知识。