New Curricula for a New Way of Teaching 103 are confused, or when a long-held belief is challenged, with a request for evidence. She might have asked where she might try duck or what duck tasted like since she had not understood it correctly. She might have allowed for the possibility that she was wrong and asked to know more. But she didn’t. People who aren’t intellectually curious rarely do. This kind of dull thinking is not so much a matter of genetics as it a matter of not having been educated properly. And, that is, of course, the real issue here. If a child grows up in a world where questions are expected and where long-held beliefs can be abandoned because of new evidence, he will seek such interactions. But a child who grows up in a world where adults set themselves up as knowing everything and no one’s beliefs are ever questioned, you will get mindless behavior like this. Of course, it doesn’t matter if this woman doesn’t try duck. It is likely, however, that this behavior pattern—learn rules and never question them—pervades her life. This leads me to my main point. Scripts are great things to have. They get you through the airport. They get you through Burger King. They get you through most of the mundane aspects of life. But scripts need to be modified. They fail all the time. The airport starts a new check-in procedure. The restaurant you always go to deletes your favorite item from the menu. The store you always shop in is getting very crowded. At some point we encoun- ter script failure and we deal with it. The question is how. We deal with script failure using two key procedures. It is our facil- ity with these procedures that differentiates intelligence from stupid- ity. Thinking depends on them, and everyone must do them when trying to think. But not everyone does them well. The procedures are: Generalization Explanation These are not new ideas in the context of this book. Explanation is one kind of describing. Generalization is the method by