The parent might be justified in wondering what makes Dogbert assume children are capable of critical thinking at all. Only a person who views children as pint-sized adults could conceive of such a notion. Beyond its sheer annoyance, this strip helped to crystallize for me a couple of basic, fundamental, critical mistakes we seem to be making in our current attitudes towards child rearing. The first is directly reflected in the offending comic strip. We have imputed powers of distinction and critical thinking to our children that are completely beyond anything experience or science suggests.
Children are by definition remarkably self-centered beasts.
Their world revolves around serving their own physical and emotional needs. From teaching kindergartners how to share, to imparting rules about controlling one s agitated adolescent hormones, growing up is painful lesson after painful lesson about the boundaries that are essential to observe in a decent society. Left to their own devices, five-year olds will not share, and sixteen year old boys will not respect girls. Yet this is precisely the approach preferred by our public schools and cultural engines, and it is apparently bearing its sour fruit around us on a daily basis. One can almost see the moral capital wearing thinner by the day as we lose touch with the generations that imparted it.