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130 Teaching Minds
Children normally make judgments about the behavior of their
parents and friends as well. In all these cases, judgment is best taught
by having a student watch the behavior of others, keeping himself out
of the issue and seeing what factors motivated and determined the
behavior of the actors. It is a lot easier to teach proper behavior when
it is not one’s own behavior that is being judged. One can learn to act
by judging how others act.
So, children make judgments all the time. Typically those judg-
ments reflect the values that they have been taught at home. Children
decide what is good and what is bad mostly based on what they have
been told. No child discovers for himself that George Washington was
an admirable man. No child decides on his own that the United States
is the best country in the world. These things are taught by parents
and by schools. School, to the extent that it serves as a place of in-
doctrination, has always succeeded at producing citizens who believe
what they are taught to believe at a young age. There obviously is a
great deal of sentiment for keeping indoctrination as a key part of
education, but teaching judgment means allowing children to come
to conclusions based on their own experience and not merely what
they were told.
Learning to make judgments is a process of deciding for oneself
what is true, which is, of course, not so easy. This should be the role of
school but it usually isn’t. School wants to teach us the truth when, in
fact, truth is best discovered, again, from experience.
How would one discover the “best country in the world,” if that
is a meaningful idea, or whether George Washington was all he was
cracked up to be? Obviously, travel helps teach one about countries.
Kids can learn about countries by simulated travel in the modern era.
But the point wouldn’t be so much to teach them that they make good
cheese in France, which is the kind of thing school does today, but to
think about what makes France different from the United States. Simi-
larly, we can read and learn some facts about George Washington, and
these are indeed taught to children in primary school. I do not believe
that children are equipped at a young age to determine for themselves
whether Washington was a good man. Perhaps that would be a worth-
while assignment in high school, as long as students were interested
in the question and were allowed to come to any conclusion that they
could reasonably defend. But children of 5 or 6 can understand what
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