So the best advice I can give a fifteen-year-old stuck in an outdated school somewhere in Mexico, India, or Alabama is: don’t rely on the adults too much. Most of them mean well, but they just don’t understand the world. In the past, it was a relatively safe bet to follow the adults, because they knew the world quite well, and the world changed slo

You might think that choosing role models is simple: Children should just copy their parents, right? But that turns out to be a losing strategy. There is no reason for a child to assume that her own parents happen to be the most skilled adults in the community, so why not search more widely?

Our own view is that children’s whole conception of people, objects, and words changes radically in the first three years of life. And it changes because of what children find out about the world. We already said that babies start out with complex, abstract, coherent representations of the world and rules for manipulating them. They use those repre