The commercial jetliner taxied up to the concourse and discharged its passengers, among them the visiting grandparents of a small boy. After the greetings were over and the small boy had been given his present, he turned to his parents and asked: "Why do Grandpa and Grandma live up in the sky?"
From his viewpoint, his question wasn't at all humorous or ingenuous. He had been brought to the airport a few months before, had watched his grandparents climb into what was to all outward appearances the same jetliner that had just discharged them and fly off into the blue. Now the same process had occurred in reverse, and here were his grandparents again.
The concept of his grandparents flying around in a jet for several months did not disturb him because nothing in his experience conflicted with such a concept. He had not yet been educated to fall into the habit of arranging all the information coming to his consciousness into patterns of thought and concept, patterns that would make him feel disturbed whenever he was presented with information that did not fit within an already established format.
