Far from being empty receptacles or universal learners, then, children are equipped with a toolbox of implements for reasoning and learning in particular ways, and those implements must be cleverly recruited to master problems for which they were not designed. That requires not just inserting new facts and skills in children’s minds but debugging and disabling old ones. Students cannot learn Newtonian physics until they unlearn their intuitive impetus-based physics. 14 They cannot learn modern biology until they unlearn their intuitive biology, which thinks in terms of vital essences. And they
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