CHAPTER 3 What Can’t You Teach? Nothing in education is so astonishing as the amount of igno- rance it accumulates in the form of inert facts. —Henry B. Adams When children are born, they come with distinct personalities. Ask any mother of a second child. “It even behaved differently in the womb,” she will say. One kid is aggressive while the other is contem- plative. One kid is constantly talking while the other hardly says a word. One kid is shy while the other is outgoing. Often, when we think about teaching and learning, we have the idea that if we want someone to do something, or know something, or behave in a certain way, all we have to do is teach it to them. So we teach kids to appreciate music, when they may have no interest in, or inclinations toward, music at all, or to act in the class play, when they are simply bad at acting, or to throw a baseball when they simply can’t do it and don’t care. Often, but not always, we are forgiving of the differences between people and their individual talents and we acknowledge that she is tone deaf, or he will always throw poorly, and we give up. Small children are like sponges. They ask questions constantly and, if they have reasonable parents, get answers. The belief system that children adopt is usually quite similar to that of their parents. They don’t decide to try out a different religion at age 5; they do what they have always known. They eat what they were fed and they like to go to places they have been taken. Parents influence every aspect of a child’s belief system. Because of that, we have the sense that we can teach children anything, but this gets less true as they get older. The Jesuits have a saying about teaching a child before he is 7 and thus producing the man he will become. There is some truth to this. If you really learn honesty when you are 5, it is unlikely you will become a crook. Your subconscious wouldn’t permit it. a5 HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_023781