At Cultural Attractions: Parents Don't Teach, Children Don't Learn

The Buffalo Zoo celebrated the traditionally-last weekend of summer by offering a ninety percent discount on admission on Labor Day. Since one dollar is something I can just about afford on a good week, I took a holiday-morning bike ride around Delaware Park and then queued up with the mass of people, mostly families with small children, who had just as readily sprung at the opportunity for a cheap cultural activity.

Considering the lines at the gate, I was surprised that the scene inside was not as claustrophobic as it could have been. It took a little jostling or waiting in the wings to get a proper angle, but everyone seemed to get their opportunity to look at the cute, or fearsome, or comic animals. I freely admit that I was mostly there just to take another look at some of my favorite creatures, to watch the polar bear swim in its artificial pond, far from the threatened environment of its natural-born fellows, to grin down on the docile capybaras lounging in the rainforest exhibit, to rediscover my respect for the vulture which I discovered when I wrote a report on the species in elementary school, to look for big cats pacing like in Rilke's description of the panther.

But even though this excursion wasn't exactly intended as a fact-finding field trip, I never go to a museum or zoo or aquarium without trying to learn something about the stuff I'm looking at. Not a heck of a lot changes at the Buffalo Zoo from year to year, and I think I had been there about a year ago, so it's not as if I could have expected to discover an animal the existence of which I was altogether unaware of. But there's only so much I can commit to memory, so naturally I find myself rediscovering things on subsequent visits to the same places of learning. I always seem to forget, for instance, that the Rocky Mountain Bighorn Sheep are capable of running at up to fifty miles per hour. The up-side of my disappointment at not retaining encyclopedic recollections – a failure that seems to become ever-worse as I age – is that I sometimes get to re-experience the joy of learning something interesting all over again.

Even if I don't read all of the wildlife facts, of which there aren't even that many at the Buffalo Zoo, I do at the very least try to get the names of the animals right. This is more than I can say of the vast majority of the other patrons that I encountered yesterday. It having been a year since my last visit, I found myself trying to actively identify each species, endeavoring to commit to memory the ones that escaped me this time around. This is natural to me, and I thought it was part of the essential purpose of going to the zoo. I always took it to be a place where you went not merely to look at animals as in a menagerie, but to find out something about the wider world by discovering what they are and from where they come. I especially thought that that was why parents took their children to the zoo. I'd always assumed that it was meant as a supplement to a child's primary education, a way to instantiate curiosity and gauge the direction of nascent scholarship. Apparently I was quite wrong about this as well.

Most any time that I go to places like zoos or museums and find myself crowded by children and their adult chaperones, I am downright shocked by the lack of interest that parents have in conveying any information whatsoever to their charges, or even in encouraging those children to learn anything on their own. I fear that my disdain paints me as a killjoy and that the average reader will see me as attaching far too much significance to the conduct of people who are on a simple, light-hearted family outing. But that's just the trouble. I worry that people attach entirely too little significance to such everyday opportunities to influence the character, values, and perspective of impressionable children.

As much as Americans today recognize and lament the widespread failure of education and the failure of modern children to live up to appropriate standards, I think commentators and individual parents are too much inclined to see that failure as institutional and too little inclined to consider it as social and cultural. If the behavior of parents at zoos and museums is indicative of their broader attitudes, it suggests that people have widely forfeited the recognition of personal responsibility for the education of their own children, instead handing that responsibility off to schools as if the process of raising an intellectually astute and ambitious child is something that can be consolidated into a specific set of hours in specific locales.

If that is indeed the view – if the need for education is recognized, but only recognized as being needed somewhere outside the home – then I can only conclude that people don't really value education at all. That is, they don't value education as it ought to be valued, for its own sake, as both a public and a personal good. You can't expect children to learn well and perform at a high level in school if the culture that they're coming up in is one that portrays education as a sort of obligation and something that brings good things to the learner, but is not good enough in its own right to be worth pursuing in absence of the social obligations of homework and exams.

What else can I conclude from regularly observing that perfectly middle class parents, far from exhibiting much intellectual curiosity of their own, don't even respond to the intellectual curiosities of their own children. But perhaps that's a little unfair. At the zoo yesterday I did find one or two adults expressing curiosity to the extent that they pressed their faces to the glass and perplexedly asked of no one in particular, “What is it?” They just didn't express a great deal of interest in actually doing anything to satisfy their curiosity. They just couldn't be bothered to walk back two feet in order to read the damn nameplate.

This is entirely their own affair when the adults are on their own and solely responsible for their own edification or ignorance. But it gets under my skin when their own lack of care for finding answers threatens to be transmitted to a child who is still blessed by wide-eyed eagerness to comprehend the world around him, whatever aspects of it should set itself before him.

Just a few exhibits down from where I heard one unresolved ejaculation of “What is it?” I found myself looking at another glass enclosure that housed three wallabies crouching at the back of their habitat, when a family walked around me to look at the same. It was comprised of a couple with a daughter just barely of speaking age and a son perhaps six years old. The parents looked, glassy-eyed, into the scene while the boy excitedly called out “kangaroos!” I had started moving away from the exhibit, but noticing the boy being met with silence, I said simply “wallabies,” partly in hopes that his parents would hear me and realize, if they did not realize it on their own, that their son had made a reasonable but slightly mistaken assumption about what they were looking at.

However, I was essentially met with silence, too, except in that the boy, perhaps hearing me or perhaps just seeking acknowledgment from his parents, repeated “kangaroos.” Noticing that they weren't going to say anything and that their eyes had apparently still not passed over the signs that clearly stated the name of the species, I repeated, with the boy more specifically in mind, “wallabies.” Now looking squarely at me, and inquisitively, the boy again said “kangaroos.” It could not have been more obvious that the child was interested in being corrected. He wanted to learn, as most children do when simply presented with the opportunity. This child was young, but most likely old enough to sound out the word “wall – a – bye” if he knew where to look, and if he was made to realize that he didn't know the answer without looking. But to do that, he would need an example to follow, a pair of parents who had the tools to find out answers for themselves, and cared to give their children the same.

The child looking to me instead of his parents for that meager bit of instruction, I addressed him directly, explaining, “No, these are wallabies. Kangaroos are big; these are smaller.” And at that he turned to his parents and his younger sibling to repeat it to them: “These aren't kangaroos, the man says.” At that I was walking away, and I can only hope that their son's claim finally prompted them to look at the sign and sound out “wall – a – bees.” It was up to them to take an interest on their own, but it seemed to me that the child, being a child, not only wanted to know about these things in the zoo, but wanted others to know about them to.

I experienced the same thing elsewhere. In the crowded rainforest exhibit, I, being a nerd, spoke straight to the capybaras, telling them that I just wanted them to know that they are the largest rodents on Earth, and that that's awesome and they should be proud. A young girl just beside me asked, seemingly of no one in particular, "What are those called?" It could be that she heard me demonstrating some knowledge of them and figured that I had the answer, or it could be that she, like so many young children, thought her parents would have all the answers she sought.

She had not spoken straight to me, and that being the case, I would think that a scientifically interested parent, one familiar with zoos, would say something like, “I don't know, let me look at this information card over here so we can find out.” The parents did not move, of course, so I turned to the child and told her, “Those are called capybaras.” Naturally, she then looked back to her parents and sought to inform them of what they did not inform themselves: “They're called capee-bears.” The parents did not repeat the information; they did not move to confirm it or commit it to memory; they did not give her any indication that she should feel proud of having learned something, that she should be thankful for the knowledge, or that she should seek to learn other things as well.

The desire to learn is so natural and so passionate among children. How poorly we must regard it as a society that students evidently end up so thoroughly dissuaded from eager learning long before reaching the lower threshold of adulthood. What standards can we possibly expect students to meet if we handicap them in all the faculties that might prompt them to aim above the mark. If this culture persists, the most likely solution is simply to expect less of students, as has already become the defining feature of decades in the devolution of higher education.

In the future of this culture, we may as well just rename familiar animals to match the absent understandings of parents and their children. Having been to a couple of zoos and aquariums in recent years I've found that as far as doting children and intellectually incurious parents are concerned, every lemur is called King Julian and every clownfish is Nemo. This really aggravates me. My best friend is terrifically fond of the Niagara Aquarium, so I have gone there with her on several occasions. Upon every visit, without fail, one can hear at least half a dozen parents exclaiming, “All right, let's find Nemo,” or, “There's Nemo.” I think I've heard the word “clownfish” used by a parent to a child exactly once.

I have no doubt that some of these parents are just lazy and find “Nemo” easy to remember, but I warrant that a number of them may have good intentions. They're probably trying to use pop culture as a way to facilitate their children's interest in the natural world. But there's more than one reason why this is misguided. For one thing, having been to the aquarium several times, it's clear that children don't need some secondary point of reference in order to take an interest in the natural world, because the natural world is terrifically fascinating. And that's especially obvious when you're a child.

So using an animated film as a way of connecting with an aquatic exhibit is extraneous, but far worse than that it obfuscates children's understanding of what they're actually looking at. It disregards the separation between fantasy and reality, it suppresses knowledge of the actual species name, and it encourages children to understand the creature through an individual depiction and not through objective facts. And then on top of all of this, for many families the fixation on something that is recognizable from fiction overrides the significance of everything else that's on display. People walk in the door and say, “Find Nemo!” and they breeze through ninety percent of the aquarium to get to something that won't teach a child very much that he doesn't already know. If they didn't immediately put that idea in his head, they might be astonished by how much he doesn't care about the clownfish once he's seen the solitary-social penguins, the balloonfish with their glittering eyes, the sharks skulking past viewing windows, the challengingly camouflaged rockfish, and so on and so on.

When parents almost thoughtlessly constrain the purpose of visits to zoos and aquariums and museums, they probably think, more often than not, that they are doing it for the benefit of their children, that they are moving to retain a young attention span and provide its owner a quick shot of enrichment while they can. In fact, I think such parents and caregivers should consider that they might have it all backwards and that the feelings of stress and impatience are all their own, and merely projected onto their children. They should concern themselves less with what their children are looking to get out of the experience, and more with what they themselves are after. If the answer isn't “knowledge, and lots of it,” they can probably expect much more of their children's interest in the moment. But they likely won't be able to go on expecting it as those children age in the presence of a society that doesn't care particularly much for learning.

Immorality of and for Children

Moving about my town this weekend, I made two markedly unpleasant observations, which were quite distinct from each other, but also meaningfully connected. They both spoke to the deplorable effect that many adults have upon the children growing up around them, in the one place through the influences they predicate upon them indirectly, and in the other through what they willfully do to them.

When I had just gone out of my home to catch a bus and go to meet a friend, I was walking down the principal street of my neighborhood and I saw a ten year-old boy turn to stare openly and at length at the backside of a seven year-old girl who had walked past him. Now, it could be that there was some other context that I was missing – he may have recognized her from elsewhere but been too shy to call out to her – but to my eye his behavior was indistinguishable from that of the appallingly many men I have seen stop in their tracks and follow with their eyes the receding course of a woman they find attractive.

The young boy didn’t appear to be simply looking; he appeared to be leering, and I know all too well what that looks like. It’s been so commonplace in recent years that there’s no longer any deluded part of me that’s willing to pass it off as an anomaly when I see another man doing it. It’s become a social trend, and in turn I’ve become pretty consistent in reacting to it in some fashion when I see it. That action only rises to the level of staring crazily at the unabashed lecher, but my hope is that by thereby calling attention to the fact that he’s not invisible to the world just because the object of his ogling has her back turned I can help to instill a slight sense of shame.

To do so seems like an even stronger imperative now that I’ve seen a young boy exhibiting the same brazen rejection of self-restraint. After all, the boy was about ten years old, and the object of his leering about seven. Unless human biology has changed far more than I realize, there’s no way that he has sufficiently developed sexuality to provide him with a strong instinctual desire to look. Even if there was, that instinct would direct his attention toward a woman with fully developed secondary sexual characteristics, not a child like himself.

The logical conclusion, as I see it, is that the boy was showcasing an environmentally learned behavior. The vulgar social trend of open displays of unchecked lust is probably self-progenitive, like many social behaviors, and will grow and worsen in communities where it is not combated. What I observed was a ten year-old boy having learned lecherousness before he ever learned about sex, and perhaps before he’d so much as heard the word “hormones.” It is a truly hideous culture that allows its youth to inherit vices before they inherit any reasons for indulging them. And that is a trend that is only interrupted by adults within the culture being mindful of the behaviors that they put on display to their children, and seeing that the indulgence of common vices never outstrips the reasons for them.

While the incidental corruption of youth by the action of a collective culture is awful, at least there is a plea of ignorance to be made. What is worse still is putting the worst of oneself on display in full awareness of the fact that a child is the main witness or the direct object of it. I was coming back with my friend from where we had met up, and we had to wait a few minutes in the Metro Rail station before transferring to a bus. Other passengers emerged from the tunnel with us and most of them headed straight out to the street. A boy who may have been as young as four, accompanied by who I presume to be his mother, was among them, but the two stopped short inside the door at the behest of the woman’s sudden and exceptionally severe shouting.

“Are you serious?! Tie your goddam shoe! I’m fucking sick of this shit! Tie your goddam shoe! And it better fucking stay tied this time, or I’m gonna beat your ass!”

She delivered these commands and threats with lengthy pauses and with repetition, so that the entire affair lasted a thirty seconds or so as the boy sat on a bench and tied his shoe while she stood imposingly over him, doing nothing but staring down with a fury that never relented. I stood nearby and glanced repeatedly in their direction with a similar, but I think righteous, fury in my eyes. But that was it; I reacted in the same way that I tend to react to lechers on the street, which I steadily realized was not good enough as I watched them go.

As always seems to be the case when there is a subtle but significant opportunity for me to stand up for something, I found myself regretting my prolonged silence for a long time after the fact. When these demonstrations of immorality spring themselves upon me, it tends to take me time to process what I am witnessing. And in this case, I wrestled silently with the situation for too long. It’s one thing when someone is harassing a stranger, but another when some public conflict is between friends or among family. The lack of known circumstance makes me reluctant to insert myself into a situation that does not concern me. Perhaps there are issues involved that I don’t understand.

In this case at the rail station, my moral compass wobbled terribly because of the fact that it was the woman’s own child at whom she was directing her aggression. I’ve always found that there is a common but flawed cultural assumption that people have special rights and privileges in dealing with their children, and that it’s almost never the place of the community to insert itself into another person’s parenting. But recognizing the common assumption as flawed doesn’t mean that I entirely avoid being influenced by it. The effect is evidently that I feel I must be quite sure that a situation rises to the level of unjustifiability, as by involving physical violence, before I confront wrongful actions against one’s own child.

Unfortunately, when the aggression doesn’t cross the line from threats to physicality, I’m compelled to make moral, rational, and probabilistic calculations before my perception of the situation reaches a breaking point at which my mind exclaims, “of course there’s no justification for that!” Of course there was no justification for this woman screaming at her four year-old child because his shoelaces had come undone. He’s four. He probably learned how to tie a bow just months or weeks prior, and clearly he wasn’t getting any help from his mother in perfecting the craft. Her assistance took the form only of demeaning criticism and public humiliation, and even if that isn’t the normal dynamic between them when the child is struggling with something, her response isn’t justified even in an isolated case.

I wanted to defend the child against the maternal onslaught he was absorbing, and it would have been worth doing so not just for the sake of protecting his fragile emotions, but perhaps more so for the sake of protecting his malleable mind from being warped into the image of the insanely hot-headed, irrational woman who is raising him. The aggression hurts the child in the short term, but he’ll get over it. Kids are resilient. But at the same time, dealing with his problem by doing nothing more than shouting at him to fix it or suffer the consequences gives the impression that that’s the best – perhaps the only – way to solve further problems. One day, that child will grow into a man who has the power over someone else in a situation, and if his mother’s treatment of him is indicative of the overall environment that he’s living in, there’s a definite risk that he’ll command that power without reason or restraint.

At a higher level, there’s a terrible social consequence to the message that’s sent by the parenting techniques that the woman put on public display that night. The black mother and son, being in Buffalo, were almost certainly from a background of low socio-economic status. A cycle of enforcement that says “solve your problem or suffer the consequences” is indicative of a tragic victim-blaming tendency that even operates inside of disadvantaged communities. Rather than doing anything to help the boy become more practiced at tying his shoes, his mother merely insisted that he do it better, implying that worse consequences of failure would be as good as greater opportunities for success. One wonders if she will offer the same message when he needs help on his homework, or when he’s looking for a job, or when he needs a social support system. There is an implied resignation there, accepting the assertion that there’s something wrong with the individual, or the race, or the community, and that until such time as that changes, there’s little point in trying to help them to better outcomes.

Everything moral choice that we make – with respect to our children, our neighbors, within ourselves – begins the alteration or supports the preservation of the way things are at the level of the family, of the community, and throughout the culture. I failed to decide quickly to step up to the woman and insist that she stop screaming expletives at her child and start actually raising in hopes that he’ll be even better than she. And in that failure, I missed an opportunity to put a new nick in the structure of the world as it is. I feel as though had she stayed around another moment I would have been past my breaking point, but as it was she stalked off quickly enough that I barely raised my voice before she was through the door. However, her child trailed behind her, and I saw that he looked squarely back at me as he was going out. In absence of having truly stood up against an example of horrible stewardship of our children, I comfort myself with the hope that the boy himself recognized my indignation for what it was, and that even as he followed his raving mother, he realized that not everybody is the same, that there are other sorts of people that he can grow into.

Infant Morality

Recent research in child psychology provides new insight into the development of moral judgments. The proximity to the topic of ethics reminds me of how discussions in college philosophy classes very frequently turned to the subject of child psychology at one time or another. The results of the new research raise a variety of questions in my mind.

The study, by Kiley Hamlin of the University of British Columbia, showed babies of five and eight months old a series of videos, in which one puppet either helped or hindered another in a task, and later either had a toy returned to or taken from it by a third puppet. Three quarters of five month old children preferred the third puppet to return the toy no matter what, but eight month olds gave preference to the giver or taker depending on the earlier actions of the puppet from whom it was giving or taking.

The conclusion that has been drawn from this is that between those ages, children learn to determine whether a person deserves good or bad outcomes. That is, they have developed a sense of justice, and see value in rewards and punishments in addition to just straightforward good and bad. University College London child psychologist Uta Frith is quoted in the coverage of this research as saying: “To me this says that toddlers already have more or less adult moral understanding. Isn’t this amazing? I don’t know in what way adults would react in the same situation in a more sophisticated way.”

She may be right that toddlers possess adult moral understanding, but I would add that that doesn’t necessarily say anything good about toddlers; it says something terrible about adults. I also reflects badly on the persons conducting the research, or at least those commenting on it, who seem to be entirely too cavalier about the accuracy of intuitive moral judgments. Although reward and punishment are sensible moral concepts, it seems to me that by lauding eight month olds for having a natural inclination towards tit-for-tat ethics actually contradicts one of the noble axioms we end up teaching them later: two wrongs don’t make a right.

It strikes that based on the description of the experiment, and the accompanying videos of the puppets, the child participants have no reason to believe that the giver and taker puppets actually witnessed the helping or hindering actions of the other puppets. If that’s so, they aren’t judging the appropriateness of specific acts of reward or punishment; rather, they are projecting a sense of justice, from their own points of view, onto independent events. That doesn’t strike me as morally sound. It seems quite subjective, and it may be worth noting that in the experiments this natural subjectivity is coming from someone who has not yet developed an independent sense of self.

I wonder whether it has struck the original researchers that these observations may imply a groundwork for the development of religious concepts in the human mind. Given that the children are not judging the appropriateness of direct reward and punishment from the person who has been harmed or hindered, the justice that is being dispensed turns out to be a sort of cosmic justice. That is, if a child continues to think that good and bad outcomes are deserved or undeserved regardless of their actual connection to prior good deeds or wrongdoing, there comes a certain point at which a sophisticated intelligence needs to give some account of how punishment can work without human intention. Notions like God and karma fit the bill.

So eight month olds and twenty-eight year olds alike might be inclined to think well of unprovoked acts of aggression if their victims have formerly showed themselves to be assholes, because the act is justified from their own limited point of view. That is, many adults may indeed fail to “react in the same situation in a more sophisticated way.” But I certainly think they ought to do better. Adults, who have had some time to reflect on the tremendous nuance of ethical calculations, should be capable of making moral judgments from an objective point of view.

It disturbs me to think that natural human development leads one to consequentialism, because I don’t think that’s the correct conclusion. Rather, acts are good or bad in and of themselves, not based on their outcomes or whether their objects are deserving. You can either give the ball back to the puppet that dropped it, or you can take it from him. Stealing is no more or less wrong if the puppet had been a jerk beforehand. Interestingly, that is apparently the way the five month olds in the study see things. So in my view infant morality may be preferable to toddler morality.

Before this, I thought that deontology and consequentialism were competing on a fairly level playing field. Now I see that the deck may be stacked against my favored category of ethical theory, in that promoting deontology requires overriding aspects of human nature. That makes for a challenging breaking point.

Of course, the results of this research were not unanimous for all participants, and some demonstrated different preferences. That leads me to wonder whether those children that preferred a puppet who returned toys even to bad puppets will naturally grow up to be adults like me, who believe that the rightness or wrongness of an act is unaffected by its surrounding context. Perhaps there is an evolutionary trait that appears in the development of a minority of children and leads them to make ostensibly moral judgments that are quite different from what these researchers conclude is normal and assert is accurate.

But the fact remains that the vast majority of children evidently grow into a natural belief that right and wrong are subjective and context-dependent. And the further fact remains that I believe that’s false and unethical. Thus, my view is that in a philosophically and morally sophisticated society, some natural consequences of child development, such as the impulse to cheer on the misfortune of those who have caused misfortune, need to be overridden later in life.

"If You Need Mommy, Leave a Voicemail"

I witnessed another instance of questionable parenting today. Fortunately, this latest scene is less distinctly shocking to me than yesterday’s example of parental instruction in amorality, but it almost makes up for that by involving not an independent-minded teenager, but a very small child, who is so much more prone to minute influences.

Childish Opinions

In the interest of keeping this post in line with the last, I thought I'd comment on a viral video that was making the rounds last week, depicting a five year-old girl insisting that she will not marry until she first has a job.

While some of the first comments to appear in response lamented the child's evident "brainwashing," the vast majority of those that followed took umbrage with that kind of commentary, with many emphasizing that the alternative is a role into which young girls are constantly brainwashed by toys, media, and the like. I can't argue with that, but I can argue that it seems a little misguided to defend the girl's parent by saying that her indoctrination is no different from society's indoctrination. For most people on either side of the argument, the decision to criticize or laud the instillation of an ideology in a child just comes down to whether they find the ideology to be agreeable. I think that misses the point by a seriously wide margin.

I happen to think that marriage is an antiquated institution, so I'm in favor of what the little girl has to say. In fact, I don't think she goes far enough, in that she still seems to take it for granted that she will marry eventually. That's not to say that I want her to enhance her views in another video. Actually, I want her to say nothing whatsoever on the topic, because, you know, she a fucking five year old child. The problem, in my mind, is not the kind of ideas we instill in our children, but the fact that we think it's okay to instill ideas in children.

Perhaps this commentary belies my respect for youth, and my belief that even children are capable of independent reasoning, because when it comes to things like this video, I find it impossible to believe that I'm witnessing anything other than repetition of something an adult has said. Five is awfully young, but I would be so bold as to say that by something like age nine, a child may well have the mental development and range of experience to make a decision about their own beliefs. Still, I don't think that they would tend to actually do so, because they'd probably be too busy being children. Marriage and careers aren't something we need to be thinking about at five, or even at nine. We should be teaching our children the skills and information that they will need to live full lives and have successful careers and personal relationships, but it's not necessary to have then planning out how they're going to utilize those skills before they can do long division. In fact, I would say that if we're raising out children right, it's for precisely that reason that we shouldn't be filling them with our ideas: we're giving them the tools to arrive at the right decision on their own.

Honestly, what bothers me about this video is not the sentiment. It's not even the mere sense that the girl's been told what to say. What bothers me is the aggressive intensity with which this five year-old girl speaks. A child that age should not be capable of such condescension. That's what makes it brainwashing: that the views a parent has instilled in her child come with their own safeguards, and those safeguards are not reason and logical analysis, but rather anger and rehearsal. When you fill a child with ideas rather than with the means of arriving at their own ideas, you tend to provide them with an undue sense of certitude, which makes every alternative appear not as a reasonable challenge, but as an attack on an ingrained part of their belief system. I don't think you can put an idea into the mind of a child without also giving them increased resistance to new ideas.

Is my view on this really so out of the ordinary? I can't seem to find much discussion that looks past the question of whether what a seemingly opinionated child is saying is right or wrong. I'd like to see a breaking point in this discourse, whereby we stop arguing over the content, and start analyzing the source of the content. And more than that, is there a way to reach a breaking point that makes us collectively realize that it's not our job, our right, or our responsibility to tell children what to think? Or will the breaking point only come when we have an over-arching structure of education that finally makes our children smart enough, early enough that they can resist any efforts of indoctrination by their parents, whether those ideas are good or ill?