Einstein describes curiosity as a plant rather than a faculty: something that grows on its own, needs the right conditions, and can be killed. Encouragement helps, but the essential requirement is freedom, by which he means room to follow a question without being directed or examined.

The charge against instruction is specific. It is not that teaching is poor but that compulsion is the wrong instrument. Coercion, in this account, does not simply fail to produce interest; it destroys interest that was already there.

The passage follows Einstein’s account of preparing for his final examinations at the Zurich Polytechnic, where the pressure of absorbing so much material had such a deterrent effect that for a year afterwards he found any consideration of scientific problems distasteful. The judgement he draws from it is put generally, as a verdict on modern instruction rather than on one institution.