From Who Needs Imagination? an interview with Harvard professor Paul Harris:
Up to a point, when we think of young children in preschool environments, we think that this is an important part of their learning. And no doubt it is. But I want to say that human beings and young children clearly have the opportunity to learn all sorts of other things and they can only learn those from other people. So part of what I'd like to do in the next few years is to study more carefully how it is that children can learn from what I call testimony, that is, listening to people tell them things about events, episodes, entities that they can't observe for themselves. I like working with preschool children but this is the kind of topic that might oblige me to work with older children because one of the questions it raises is the following: to the extent that children are given all sorts of information about the world, they have to start discriminating among their informants. They have to start thinking about who is telling them the truth, who is offering rhetoric or propaganda. How do children start to realize that some people are more objective and some people are more evangelical than others? How do they come to make judgments about who is a reliable teacher or informant? Given that we tend to think of young children as figuring things out for themselves, I don't think we have yet asked questions about the many things that they can't figure out for themselves.
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