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.
Interpretation
Children are more influenced by their peers than by their parents' aspirations.
In this quote, Steven Pinker challenges the notion that parents have complete control over their children's development and achievements. He argues that while parental influence is significant, the peer group plays a much more critical role in shaping a child's identity, values, and accomplishments, highlighting the complex interplay between family and social environments in a child's growth.
In practice
In a discussion about parenting at a community meeting.
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.
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.
Photography is a kind of virtual reality, and it helps if you can create the illusion of being in an interesting world.
If most writers are honest with themselves, this is the difference they want to make: before, they were not noticed; now they are.
Teachers need to be comfortable talking about feelings.
In the matter of learning, the difference between the earnest and the careless student stands out clearly. The same holds true in the mastering of passion and the weaknesses to which our nature is subject, as in the acquiring of virtue.
I believe that education is the fundamental method of social progress and reform.
A newspaper consists of just the same number of words, whether there be any news in it or not.
We should spend less time at universities filling our students' minds with content by lecturing at them, and more time igniting their creativity … by actually talking with them.
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