The fact that people can forget these simple truths when intellectualizing about children shows how far modern doctrines have taken us. They make it easy to think of children as lumps of putty to be shaped instead of partners in a human relationship.
Interpretation
This quote highlights the importance of viewing children as active participants rather than mere objects to be molded by adults.
In this quote, Steven Pinker criticizes modern educational and psychological doctrines that treat children as passive entities to be shaped by adult influences, rather than recognizing them as individuals with their own thoughts and feelings. He emphasizes that in our intellectual discussions about children, we often neglect the simple truth that they are partners in relationships, deserving of respect and agency.
In practice
In a parenting workshop, discussing the role of adult expectations on children's development.
The foundation of individual rights is the assumption that people have wants and needs and are authorities on what those wants and needs are. If people's stated desires were just some kind of erasable inscription or reprogrammable brainwashing, any atrocity could be justified.
The linguistic clumsiness of tourists and students might be the price we pay for the linguistic genius we displayed as babies, just as the decrepitude of age in the price we pay for the vigor of youth.
If we are not to abandon values such as peace and equality, or our commitments to science and truth, then we must pry these values away from claims about our psychological makeup that are vulnerable to being proven false.
We adults protect ourselves with laws, police, workplace regulations and social norms and there is no conceivable reason why children should be left more vulnerable, other that laziness or callousness in considering what life is like from their point of view.
The idea that children are passive repositories to be shaped by their parents has been massively overstated. A child's peer group is a far greater determinant of its development and achievements than parental aspiration.
Reason is non-negotiable. Try to argue against it, or to exclude it from some realm of knowledge, and you've already lost the argument, because you're using reason to make your case. ... We don't "believe" in reason.
We're now segregating our schools based on economics; we're segregating our schools based on where a child's parents live. And it has the same corrosive effect of destroying people's opportunity as racial segregation did.
One's work may be finished someday, but one's education never.
A child who can love the oddities of a fantasy book cannot possibly be xenophobic as an adult. What is a different color, a different culture, a different tongue for a child who has already mastered Elvish, respected Puddleglums, or fallen under the spell of dark-skinned Ged?
People are beginning to realize that education is power, that education is money, that education is an opportunity.
My purpose... to go on with my heart and soul, devoting all my energies to Girl Scouts, and heart and hand with them, we will make our lives and the lives of the future girls happy, healthy and holy.
If you are teaching Muslim sixth formers in a school, and you tell them they can't have their God and Darwin, there is a risk they will choose their God and be lost to science.
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.