There is hardly an imaginable form of genital assault that is not regularly performed on children. Nothing can be more graphic of our hatred of children than an infant mortality rate of American babies in some of our largest cities that is close to that of a Third World country, or than the fact that we tolerate the regular use of poisonous drugs by millions of our teenagers. That we choose to buy aircraft carriers at the price of dead children may not be obvious, but it is true nonetheless. Every baby born into the world is a finer one than the last. In the little world in which children have their existence, whosoever brings them up, there is nothing so finely perceived and so finely felt as injustice.
Children have to be educated, but they have also to be left to educate themselves.
The values inculcated by status-insecure parents are such that their children learn to put personal success and the acquisition of power above all else. They are taught to judge people for their usefulness rather than their likableness. They are taught to eschew weakness and passivity, to respect authority, and to despise those who have not made the socio-economic grade. Success is equated with social esteem and material advantage, rather than with more spiritual values. It must be education that does it.