What's done to children, they will do to society.
Interpretation
Children's experiences shape their future actions and impact society.
This quote by Karl A. Menninger emphasizes the profound influence that childhood experiences have on individuals, suggesting that the way children are treated will ultimately reflect in their behavior toward society as adults. It serves as a reminder that nurturing and educating children positively can lead to a more compassionate and productive society.
In practice
During a community meeting discussing educational reforms, I quoted Menninger to emphasize the importance of investing in child welfare.
People repeat in adult life emotions they experience in childhood. Many of the people whom I spent the last 30 or 40 years treating at so much per minute wouldn't have needed any treatment at all if they had had the right care as children.
We have come to see that just as the child must learn to love wisely, so he must learn to hate expeditiously, to turn destructive tendencies away from himself toward enemies that actually threaten him rather than toward the friendly and the defenseless, the more usual victims of destructive energy.
Love cures people - both the ones who give it and the ones who receive it.
We need criminals to identify ourselves with, to secretly envy and to stoutly punish. They do for us the forbidden, illegal things we wish to do.
Listening is a magnetic and strange thing, a creative force. The friends who listen to us are the ones we move toward. When we are listened to, it creates us, makes us unfold and expand.
Our lives are shaped by those who love us as well as those who refuse to love us.
Mathematics is a game played according to certain simple rules with meaningless marks on paper.
You go to school, you study about the Germans and the French, but not about your own race. I hope the time will come when you study black history too.
A professor can never better distinguish himself in his work than by encouraging a clever pupil, for the true discovers are among them, as comets amongst the stars.
Boys do not evaluate a book. They divide books into categories. There are sexy books, war books, westerns, travel books, science fiction. A boy will accept anything from a section he knows rather than risk another sort. He has to have the label on the bottle to know it is the mixture as before.
In teaching you cannot see the fruit of a day's work. It is invisible and remains so, maybe for twenty years.
I saw no African people in the printed and illustrated Sunday school lessons. I began to suspect at this early age that someone had distorted the image of my people. My long search for the true history of African people the world over began.
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