130 Teaching Minds Children normally make judgments about the behavior of their parents and friends as well. In all these cases, judgment is best taught by having a student watch the behavior of others, keeping himself out of the issue and seeing what factors motivated and determined the behavior of the actors. It is a lot easier to teach proper behavior when it is not one’s own behavior that is being judged. One can learn to act by judging how others act. So, children make judgments all the time. Typically those judg- ments reflect the values that they have been taught at home. Children decide what is good and what is bad mostly based on what they have been told. No child discovers for himself that George Washington was an admirable man. No child decides on his own that the United States is the best country in the world. These things are taught by parents and by schools. School, to the extent that it serves as a place of in- doctrination, has always succeeded at producing citizens who believe what they are taught to believe at a young age. There obviously is a great deal of sentiment for keeping indoctrination as a key part of education, but teaching judgment means allowing children to come to conclusions based on their own experience and not merely what they were told. Learning to make judgments is a process of deciding for oneself what is true, which is, of course, not so easy. This should be the role of school but it usually isn’t. School wants to teach us the truth when, in fact, truth is best discovered, again, from experience. How would one discover the “best country in the world,” if that is a meaningful idea, or whether George Washington was all he was cracked up to be? Obviously, travel helps teach one about countries. Kids can learn about countries by simulated travel in the modern era. But the point wouldn’t be so much to teach them that they make good cheese in France, which is the kind of thing school does today, but to think about what makes Franc