Education kills the joy of learning!

Situation: I have three children, current ages 11, 10 and 5, parents are University educated and engaged in the children's learning.

The progression of learning for each child has been:

Age 3: Starting to learn to read at home. Enjoying being read to, and discovering that letters and words have meaning. Starting to understand counting, and a one to one relationship between a number and a quantity of objects. Learning that numbers of objects can be added and subtracted. Really excited to learn, and will try new things if they give a chance to learn.

Age 5: Starting formal schooling, with pre-school/prep. Getting readers to take home, very excited at the time that is being spent being presented with new words. Fully understanding numbers and how to count things. fascinated by the idea of infinity and zero. Learning the concept of fractions (of apple). Loves learning.

Age 5.5; half a year into formal schooling.... I'm board at school...
Parents still introducing new ideas at home and encouraging reading of material to extend ability... Trying to introduce new maths concepts to encourage interest.

Age 6: Bringing home standard worksheets for maths and literacy, some conflict to get homework completed... Not really interested in school. Loves reading, not interested in maths.

Age 8: Don't want to go to school, Don't want to do homework... What is going on? Just wants to spend time reading. Loves an argument about the physical world.

Age 10: Discipline problems at school, no interest. Loves reading, loves computer games.. Still loves a good argument...

Age 11: OK We have a problem, High school in one year... he's missing a bunch of the basics What happened? Looks like lots of remedial work over the Christmas Holidays.

How is it that kids who are engaged and excited to be learning at five years old can so quickly have this interest buried when confronted by formal learning? How am I to prevent this from happening to my youngest (currently 5yrs) as well? She is very bright, some would say "gifted", I don't want here to start to hate learning as well. There has to be a better way!

Digging deeper and talking to the older kids it quickly becomes obvious that they do enjoy learning, they just can't be stuffed doing the boring repetitive stuff once they have grasped the concept being covered. We go over maths concepts at home... They get it, they are interested in it, they just don't want to do it at school.

Looking through the kids school books it becomes obvious that what they have been doing all year is not "learning", but more "drilling". Now I'm not an education expert, but I do understand the value of repetitive drill when practising to become an expert at a particular procedure or action, it has great value if you are a dancer, gymnast or swimmer... I'm just not sure at how good it is at instilling enthusiasm for learning and an ability to take what has been learnt and apply it to new situations.

My understanding is that the current methods of education came about shortly after the industrial revolution in Europe, and were a way of training people in a standard way that would make them suitable for employment as workers in factories and offices. We are no longer living in industrial Europe c1850, surly we should be looking at better ways of educating our young.