It may appear that in talking about actively constructing and guessing meaning, the process is a tedious one which one must consciously make an effort to perform. I am now going to argue that this is not the case.

When one observes the activity of a child, one realizes that by nature, a child actively guesses and constructs meaning. Indeed, it probably takes more effort to get a child to stop being active, than the other way round!

A few years back, I was fortunate to attend the Gifted Education Conference in which Csikszentmihalyi, a renowned psychologist who spent many years researching on the concept of flow, was a keynote speaker. According to Csikszentmihalyi, flow is a mental state in which people are fully immersed in whatever they are doing, reaching a height of joy and mental dynamism. Csikszentmihalyi proposed that there are 8 elements to the experience of flow, which include a loss of the feeling of self-consciousness, and the arousal of intrinsic motivation, resulting in an effortlessness of action.

Ng Aik Kwang, in his book "Why Asians are less creative than Westerners", talked about how westerners tend to be more task-involved, and therefore creative, while Asians tend to be more ego-involved, and hence not so creative. Being task-involved means concentrating on the task and forgoing the sense of ego. In doing so one concentrates on performing on the task, and is not restricted by his sense of failure or success, shame or pride. Being ego-involved on the other hand means that while performing a task, the person is unable to concentrate on the task but is distracted by his great desire to succeed and hence bring pride to his self-ego.

In the philosophy of Tao, both Lao Zi and Zhuang Zi have pointed out the same thing. They proposed that man by nature is creative and dynamic, open to many possibilities. It is the ego that turns man away from his natural path, creating an unnecessary conscious desire to attain success. In order to go back to the natural and creative self, one must achieve the state of Wu Wei, which means to act without will of acting. To put it simply, it is to be task-involved rather than being ego-involved.

What does all these imply for education? In his seminal work, "Experience and Education", John Dewey set forth his theory that all genuine education comes about through experience. However, some experience can be mis-educative. He proclaimed that "any experience is mis-educative that has the effect of arresting or distorting the growth of further experience". Thus a truly educative experience is one in which the possibilities of having richer experience in the future are enhanced. Of mis-education, Dewey had this to say:

"How many students, for example, were rendered callous to ideas, and how many lost the impetus to learn because of the way in which learning was experienced by them? How many acquired special skills by means of automatic drill so that their power of judgment and capacity to act intelligently in new situations was limited? How many came to associate the learning process with ennui and boredom? How many found what they did learn so foreign to the situations of life outside the school as to give them no power of control over the latter? How many came to associate books with dull drudgery, so that they were 'conditioned' to all but flashy reading matter?"

As already argued, humans are born with the natural ability to creatively generate meaning. There is really no need for society or schools to actually tell students to actively construct meaning. Rather, the most important point is to refrain from mis-education, by making students carry out abstract mathematical procedures without making meaning in an authentic context, by thumbing them down whenever they try to be creative, by excessively disciplining them and restraining their imagination.