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1718 Teaching Minds
The way to do this is to look at processes that children engage
in during the course of their daily lives and have them first explain
how and why the processes work and then try to improve upon them.
They could carefully examine the operations of the school cafeteria,
for example. Of course, this has to be done in line with the interests
that the children actually have. The idea is building the model, not
telling them what models they have to build. Every child has an inter-
est—animals, sports, family, cars, dinosaurs, whatever. Children need
to learn to model the processes that interest them in order to better
understand them and to make them better. Children will learn about
the modeling process from working on a car engine, for example, if
they are taught to think about what is going on in a deep way rather
than just learning a set of facts about how the car runs. This is true in
any area of interest, from medicine to government to science.
Adults have a difficult time with models at work, as citizens, at
home, and so on. They don’t always know how things really work. To
get people to be better at understanding the processes that they en-
gage in daily life, they need to be able to model them. This ability has
to be taught and practiced early..
Of course, kids have been building models of actual objects for a
long time. Using a kit to build a model airplane is fun but it doesn’t
teach you much about how planes fly. More detailed models of physi-
cal objects are very helpful.
Building a medieval castle, for example, sounds like fun to me,
and there are things to be learned from doing this, of course. It is a
good activity for little kids, but modeling involves social processes as
well. Kids need to understand how the world works, so it isn’t the
castle itself that is so important but perhaps a model of the society
around the castle, and the need for the castle, that would matter in
this instance.
Everyone experiments all the time. We eat foods that we hope won’t
make us fat or might make us healthy. We take drugs that are supposed
to help us, and maybe they do maybe they don’t. We try out relation-
ships that may or may not work. We experiment with jobs, hobbies,
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