Microblog Memes

magical thinking is a free-for-all. Such kids are actively taught to misunderstand reality.

Every point you made is correct, this as well. I want to add the nuance here though, that I have considered this but it's not final. That is to say, it's not an impassable wall that a child can't break through on their own. Namely because this is my origin story and I have been asked many times how I got out of it and escaped a cult-like family environment with a compound in the wilderness and everything. I had the very same magical thinking fed to me after being denied an education in any capacity for the first couple decades of my life. But I at least broke the mental spell a lot earlier, and I did it completely on my own by reaching out into the world with curiosity.

And again I think it starts with language. Because even though I was being fed magic, I have distinct memories of wrestling that magic against logic and things I understood about the world. I couldn't tell what was real or not, and even though I was scared of "questioning faith" I was also able to use logic/language to create reasoning for my inquisitiveness. IE: "God would want me to learn about his creation." "Maybe this science stuff can exist alongside the god stuff" and so on.

The reason I was able to have these mental debates in my head at all was I was an avid reader and my family didn't ban comic books for my siblings, and I used those to teach myself to read. Then I learned that I could buy and horde paperbacks because I was the only one who could really read things without pictures. Most of my family was also functionally illiterate. I however had a deeply visual and story-oriented mental landscape from before puberty.

I just think if there's any antidote to ALL OF THIS gesturing broadly then it has to be language and reading, and not reading screens but things that force your brain to construct from abstraction. That act is what makes that scaffolding you reference. You can't logic your way into new ways of viewing the world if you don't have a sense for logic to begin with. Yes, A to B. A child can see it for themselves if they are given that framework to start building their structured thinking.