Adolescents often behave much like members of an old-fashioned aristocracy. They maintain private rituals, which they often do not... really understand themselves. They are extremely conservative in their dress and tastes, but the conventions to which they adhere are purely those of their own social group; they try to ignore the norms of the larger society if these conflict with their own. They can be extravagantly generous and extravagantly cruel, but rarely petty or conniving. Their virtues are courage and loyalty; while even the necessity for even a moderate degree of compromise humiliates them greatly. They tend to be pugnacious and quarrelsome about what they believe to be their rights, but naive and reckless in defending them. They are shy, but not modest. If they become very anxious they are likely to behave eccentrically, to withdraw, or to attack with some brutality; they are less likely to blend themselves innocuously into the environment with an apologetic smile. They are honest on occasions when even a stupid adult would have better sense.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
If for Americans, at least, the Great War could sometimes be imagined as a brief, quasi-athletic lark, the Second War permitted no... such melioration by the spirit of adolescent optimism. In North Africa alone, the 1st Infantry Division spent more time in mortal contact with the enemy than all the time it spent--forming up, marching, drawing equipment, lining up at the mess hall, training, bitching--in all of the First World War. And on December 7, 1941, the American navy lost in one day more men killed--2008, to be exact--than in all the days of the earlier war. The Second World War, total and global as it was, killed worldwide, more civilian men, women, and children than soldiers, sailors, and airmen. And compared with the idiocies of Verdun, Gallipoli, or Tannenberg, it was indescribably cruel and insane. It was not until the Second World War had enacted all its madness that one could realize how near Victorian social and ethical norms the First World War really was.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
In my own view, there are clear differences between child and adult artistic activity. While the child may be aware that he is doi...ng things differently from others, he does not fully appreciate the rules and conventions of symbolic realms; his adventurousness holds little significance. In contrast, the adult artist is fully cognizant of the norms embraced by others; his willingness, his compulsion, to reject convention is purchased, at the very least, with full knowledge of what he is doing and often at considerable psychic cost to himself. As Picasso once remarked, "I used to draw like Raphael, but it has taken me a whole lifetime to learn to draw like a child."LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
There is a totalitarian regime inside every one of us. We are ruled by a ruthless politburo which sets ours norms and drives us fr...om one five-year plan to another. The autonomous individual who has to justify his existence by his own efforts is in eternal bondage to himself.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The repudiation of the primacy of understanding means the repudiation of the norms of judgment as well, and hence the abandonment ...of all ethical standards.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
There must be a profound recognition that parents are the first teachers and that education begins before formal schooling and is ...deeply rooted in the values, traditions, and norms of family and culture.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
For those parents from lower-class and minority communities ... [who] have had minimal experience in negotiating dominant, externa...l institutions or have had negative and hostile contact with social service agencies, their initial approaches to the school are often overwhelming and difficult. Not only does the school feel like an alien environment with incomprehensible norms and structures, but the families often do not feel entitled to make demands or force disagreements.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »