Children live in the same world we do. To kid ourselves that we can shelter them from it isn't just naive it's a vanity.
Interpretation
Children are part of the same reality as adults, and trying to shield them from it is both unrealistic and self-serving.
In this quote, Lionel Shriver emphasizes the importance of acknowledging the shared reality between children and adults. Rather than attempting to shelter children from the complexities and challenges of the world, which can be seen as a form of vanity and naivety, we should prepare them to navigate it. This perspective advocates for honest communication and the gradual introduction of children to the world's realities, fostering resilience and understanding.
In practice
This quote could be used in a seminar about parenting and childhood education.
Yet if there's no reason to live without a child, how could there be with one? To answer one life with a successive life is simply to transfer the onus of purpose to the next generation; the displacements amounts to a cowardly and potentially infinite delay. Your children's answer, presumably, will be to procreate as well, and in doing so to distract themselves, to foist their own aimlessness onto their offspring.
For pity's sake, if you don't take a shine to a novel, there are loads more in the world; read something else. Continue suffering, and it's not the author's fault. It's yours.
In my country, we're sufficiently consumed by the concept of happiness that the right to its pursuit is enshrined in the Declaration of Independence. But what is happiness?
You were always uncomfortable with the rhetoric of emotion, which is quite a different matter from discomfort with emotion itself.
In the big picture I write for an audience of people I've never met. By the final draft I'm looking for anything in the prose that's prospectively boring to strangers.
Not that happiness is dull. Only that it doesn't tell well. And of our consuming diversions as we age is to recite, not only to others but to ourselves, our own story.
Any teaching of falsehoods in science classes should certainly be identified and stopped by school inspectors. School inspectors should be looking at science teachings to make sure they are evidence-based science.
Never begrudge the money you spend on your own education.
A book may be very amusing with numerous errors, or it may be very dull without a single absurdity.
Education is a bubble in a classic sense. To call something a bubble, it must be overpriced, and there must be an intense belief in it.
If we want scientists and engineers in the future, we should be cultivating the girls as much as the boys.
The extreme sophistication of modern technology - wonderful though its benefits are - is, ironically, an impediment to engaging young people with basics: with learning how things work.
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