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JoshuaZ comments on Preschoolers learning to guess the teacher's password [link] - Less Wrong
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This isn't guessing a teacher's password. This is children making the reasonable (and in most circumstances accurate) assumption that adults know more about the world then they do especially when adults say so. And for the vast majority of little children, they won't be as smart as their teachers.
Sure there are stupid adults. And there are stupid teachers. (I remember the precise moment in time when I first realized that their were stupid adults. I was about 6 years old and I couldn't explain to a certain relative how War was a really dumb card game because one had no control over anything. It was a traumatic realization.)
But even for smart kids, they can benefit a lot from school, especially at an early age.
We like to complain about education. And there's no question that there are serious problems with how children learn and how our educational system functions. But for the vast majority of children, even for a lot of the smart ones, a traditional education system when it is functioning as intended works fine.
It's a case where children are repeating back what the teacher did, rather than developing a deeper understanding of how the world is. And the other experimental condition shows that the children are capable of developing a deeper understanding.
The children still do have a genuine belief about the external world (they expect the three-step process to produce music), so it's not the most degenerate case of simply parroting words that are meaningless to them, but it still seems to be on the path described in Eliezer's two posts.