Children who had previously seen a demonstration they knew to be incomplete explored the toy much more thoroughly than children who had seen a complete demonstration, suggesting that they did not trust the teacher to be fully informative.
Well, some of us, anyway. Certainly not all of us.
Led by Laura Schulz, the Class of 1943 Career Development Associate Professor of Cognitive Science....
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So is Professor Schultz in her 90s...?
This is why self-styled “Goths” in school are a direct outgrowth of the parental and teacher “cult of nice”.
To explain, in many places, education is sanitized of anything “not nice”, such as eliminating scores in team sports, refusing to discuss violent or unpleasant current events, the use of “magic” such as equating a picture of a gun with a real gun, abolishing history altogether as it is often “not nice”, etc., ad nauseum.
Nothing but pastel colors, Musak, with no sharp edges or bad feelings, ever. Self-esteem is all important, with no winners or losers.
However, the psychological impact this has on children is terrible. They know that teachers and their parents are *lying* to them by omission, and they are so scared about the ‘invisible unknown’ that so frightens the adults, that they dare not speak its name, that the children become obsessed with it.
So the children become morbid, dress in black, where makeup that makes them look like they are dead or dying, sleep in cemeteries, and fantasize about vampires and zombies.
And that’s not healthy. Even worse are the “Emo” kids, who are so emotionally deprived that they feign despair, anguish and angst, because otherwise they have no emotions in their lives. Needing to create an imaginary reason to cry and suffer is not healthy.
All these kids really want is honesty, the truth, to be taught the bad with the good, to not be deprived of emotional highs and lows. They know that there is bad in the world. By being denied knowledge of it, they fear becoming victims to it.