110 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 be a 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. 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 2. would have trouble modeling any process 3. has a limited sense of evaluation but knows what he likes 4, would be able to experiment with simple things like food and toys 5. 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 6. might be able to do limited planning based on plans that had been used before 7. might know something about causation because he would have been told about it and remembered what he had been told 8. can make some judgments based on his own tastes and what he has been taught about what is good and what is bad 9. can do some describing, but typically is not at all good at it 10. should be able to influence some people, especially his grandparents 11. should be able to work in a simple team together with kids his own age toward a goal 12. should be able to do some simple negotiation, especially with his parents, sib