Teachers . . . were not much appreciated. As one Englishman put it (in 1678): "Were the particular salaries of school-masters thro...ughout the Land set forth in a table, it is not to be feared that their amply patrimony would excite the covetousness or envy of the reader."LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The person who designed a robot that could act and think as well as your four-year-old would deserve a Nobel Prize. But there is n...o public recognition for bringing up several truly human beings.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
In the years of the Roman Republic, before the Christian era, Roman education was meant to produce those character traits that wou...ld make the ideal family man. Children were taught primarily to be good to their families. To revere gods, one's parents, and the laws of the state were the primary lessons for Roman boys. Cicero described the goal of their child rearing as "self- control, combined with dutiful affection to parents, and kindliness to kindred."LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
[17th-century] Puritans were the first modern parents. Like many of us, they looked on their treatment of children as a test of th...eir own self-control. Their goal was not to simply to ensure the child's duty to the family, but to help him or her make personal, individual commitments. They were the first authors to state that children must obey God rather than parents, in case of a clear conflict.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
If our entertainment culture seems debased and unsatisfying, the hope is that our children will create something of greater worth.... But it is as if we expect them to create out of nothing, like God, for the encouragement of creativity is in the popular mind, opposed to instruction. There is little sense that creativity must grow out of tradition, even when it is critical of that tradition, and children are scarcely being given the materials on which their creativity could workLESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Parents are used to being made to feel guilty about...their contribution to the population problem, the school tax burden, and dec...lining test scores. They expect to be blamed by teachers and psychologists, if not by police. And they will be blamed by the children themselves. It is hardy a wonder, then, that they withdraw into what used to be called "permissiveness" but is really neglect.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Nor did the world have to await scientific progress to save the bulk of its children. The highest levels of infant mortality were ...never necessary. Children have always been something of an option. The only revolutionary change which modern medicine has offered us, very recently, is the expectation that all our children will survive and the confidence to invest our affections in them. But whether this will ensure that they will stand higher among our values will also prove to be a matter of attitude.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
We like the idea of childhood but are not always crazy about the kids we know. We like it, that is, when we are imagining our own ...childhoods. So part of our apparent appreciation of youth is simply envy.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
"Our earth is degenerate in these latter days. Bribery and corruption are common. Children no longer obey their parents. . . . The... end of the world is evidently approaching." Sound familiar? It is, in fact, the lament of a scribe in one of the earliest inscriptions to be unearthed in Mesopotamia, where Western civilization was born.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Could it be that those who were reared in the postwar years really were spoiled, as we used to hear? Did a child-centered generati...on, raised in depression and war, produce a self-centered generation that resents children and parenthood?LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »