128 Teaching Minds Subject- based education makes the academic disciplines the center of what needs to be learned, when there is really something else at the base of learning. All human learning and all scientific inquiry is about causation; attempts to determine what causes what, and why, are what it means to be a scientist or an academic. Theories of cau- sation, and tests to see whether those theories are true, are what it means to be a scientist. The problem is that telling students that causation is part of sci- ence makes them think about physics formulas and fact memorization when the real issue in teaching causation is how to determine what causes what, rather than how to memorize what causes what. There are, of course, facts about causation that are worth knowing. It is nice to know that if you let go of something, it may fall, but it is not neces- sary to know that gravity is the issue in this. The world went on quite well for millions of years before Newton. People certainly understood before Newton that things would fall when you let go of them and nothing else was supporting them. Scientific explanations of causa- tion are nice for scientists but not necessary for everyday humans. What everyday people need to know is how to determine what causes what in areas of their own interest. They can hear you tell them about causation—the stock market always goes down when a Democrat is elected president—but they need to be able to decide whether what you said is true and whether it is the election that causes the decline or something else. Understanding about causation is much more a function of being able to figure out what caused what in any given instance than it is the memorization of facts about science. Of course, with known cases, as we have seen, being able to extrapolate from one case to another is a good way of determining what is likely to happen. There is no harm in knowing prior cases and great value in being able to use them. But, as always, case