Adora Svitak: What adults can learn from kids

Susan notes: Thanks to TED for making TED Talks downloadable and embeddable, and for providing the biographical information that goes along with them.

Child prodigy Adora Svitak says the world needs "childish" thinking: bold ideas, wild creativity and especially optimism.

Kids' big dreams deserve high expectations, she says, starting with grownups' willingness to learn from children as much as to teach.

A voracious reader from age three, Adora Svitak's first serious foray into writing -- at age five -- was limited only by her handwriting and spelling. (Her astonishing verbal abilities already matched that of young adults over twice her age.)

As her official bio says, her breakthrough would soon come "in the form of a used Dell laptop her mother bought her."

At age seven, she typed out over 250,000 words -- poetry, short stories, observations about the world -- in a single year.

Svitak has since fashioned her beyond-her-years wordsmithing into an inspiring campaign for literacy -- speaking across the country to both adults and kids. She is author of Flying Fingers, a book on learning