Any error learned early distorts the very way one reasons. False premises lead to false conclusions no matter how clever the line of reasoning. Theories imposed on reality are allowed to pose as substitutes for the reality itself. We see this tendency in psychologists who insist, in defiance of their own direct experience, that the mind of a newborn baby is a blank slate on which environ ment will write the impressions that will form his personality. Nothing in objective reality supports this theory.
Parents know how very different, from birth, each child is from all the others.
Therefore, it is so. We see the same tendency in Freud, who adopted virtually as his mission the attempt to explain all human motivation in terms of the sex drive. Educated people, far more so than those who have been raised in the school of hard knocks that is to say, of common sense are notoriously prone to prefer theory over reality. For education to prepare children for meeting life realistically, it should encourage them to learn from life itself, and to view with skepticism a body of fixed knowledge that has been passed on unquestioned from one generation to the next. Education must above all be experiential, and not merely theoretical.