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Teaching Minds
Britannica, if you will. It would be filled with knowledge from experts that had been vetted by other experts and delivered seamlessly with- out your having to search for it. You don’t need to bea scholar in order to make reasoned decisions. You just need to know how to find infor- mation to help you think things out well. This means that learning to think clearly and knowing how to assess the value of new evidence that one has found, must be the main goal of any school system. When does school start to falter? One way to think about school is to ask about the significance and age-related properties of each of the cognitive processes. Let’s see if we can rank the processes in terms
of age.
Which of these processes would we expect a child who was
entering school to already be able to do? To put this another way, a normal 5-year-old:
1.
11.
12,
can make some accurate predictions about very simple things, like where his mother might be and what she might be doing and what will be on television
would have trouble modeling any process
has a limited sense of evaluation but knows what he likes would be able to experiment with simple things like food and toys
might be able to do limited diagnosis of what might have gone wrong in a process, but it typically would be limited to explanations that he had heard from someone else
might be able to do limited planning based on plans that had been used before
might know something about causation because he would have been told about it and remembered what he had been told
can make some judgments based on his own tastes and what he has been taught about what is good and what is bad
can do some describing, but typically is not at all good at it
. should be able to influence some people, especially his
grandparents
should be able to work in a simple team together with kids his own age toward a goal
should be able to do some simple negotiation, especially with his parents, siblings, and some friends
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