Then, what is the role of the subconscious here? When a child is be

36 Teaching Minds Then, what is the role of the subconscious here? When a child is be- ing taught at 3, he is not being taught consciously. He does not memo- rize rules for walking or talking and he does not learn anything very much by consciously trying to learn. Rather, a child absorbs by con- stantly practicing and then making that practice a part of who she is. Later, when the subconscious attitudes about walking, talking, relating to others, family values, and all the rest, are well within the deep subconscious of the child, we begin the attempt to teach the child consciously. We worry when we hear, for example, that: About a quarter of teens questioned in the broad survey weren’t able to correctly identify Adolph Hitler as Germany’s chancellor during World War II. About 20 percent couldn’t say whom America fought in that war! More than a quarter wrongly believed Columbus sailed to the New World after 1750. Half didn’t know whom Senator Joseph McCarthy investigated. And a third had no clue the Bill of Rights is the source of freedoms of religion and speech. Nearly a third couldn’t tell you who said in a famous speech: “Ask not what your country can do for you....” Until a child enters school, he has been learning things that are useful to him. He knows where his toys are and how to play with them; he knows how to get food; he knows how to get his parents to do what he wants (perhaps); he knows how to entertain himself. In short, he has learned what he has learned because he has found his new abilities to be of value. And the history cited above? Of what value is it to know about Joe McCarthy? Not only is it of no value to a child, but what we know about McCarthy is slanted by whoever is writing the history and bi- ased by whatever point the person is trying to make. It is all very well to tell students the truth about what happened in the past and assume that they will learn from it, and therefore not repeat it, but we can’t easily know the truth and they are not likely to learn much from the telling anyhow. Pundits scream and yell about what children don’t know. The question is: Why do they need to know it? If the answer is that it makes the system happy that they know certain facts while not mak- ing the child in any way happier, we all can guess how well that is going to turn out. HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_023782