The idea that children are passive repositories to be shaped by their parents has been massively overstated. A child's peer group is a far greater determinant of its development and achievements than parental aspiration.
Interpretation
Children are more influenced by their peers than by their parents' aspirations.
In this quote, Steven Pinker challenges the notion that parents have complete control over their children's development and achievements. He argues that while parental influence is significant, the peer group plays a much more critical role in shaping a child's identity, values, and accomplishments, highlighting the complex interplay between family and social environments in a child's growth.
In practice
In a discussion about parenting at a community meeting.
The foundation of individual rights is the assumption that people have wants and needs and are authorities on what those wants and needs are. If people's stated desires were just some kind of erasable inscription or reprogrammable brainwashing, any atrocity could be justified.
The linguistic clumsiness of tourists and students might be the price we pay for the linguistic genius we displayed as babies, just as the decrepitude of age in the price we pay for the vigor of youth.
If we are not to abandon values such as peace and equality, or our commitments to science and truth, then we must pry these values away from claims about our psychological makeup that are vulnerable to being proven false.
We adults protect ourselves with laws, police, workplace regulations and social norms and there is no conceivable reason why children should be left more vulnerable, other that laziness or callousness in considering what life is like from their point of view.
Reason is non-negotiable. Try to argue against it, or to exclude it from some realm of knowledge, and you've already lost the argument, because you're using reason to make your case. ... We don't "believe" in reason.
Photography is a kind of virtual reality, and it helps if you can create the illusion of being in an interesting world.
There is only one way to read, which is to browse in libraries and bookshops, picking up books that attract you, reading only those, dropping them when they bore you, skipping the parts that drag-and never, never reading anything because you feel you ought, or because it is part of a trend or a movement. Remember that the book which bores you when you are twenty or thirty will open doors for you when you are forty or fifty-and vise versa. Don’t read a book out of its right time for you.
Education must begin with the solution of the student-teacher contradiction, by reconciling the poles of the contradiction so that both are simultaneously teachers and students.
I seldom read anything that is not of a factual nature because I want to invest my time wisely in the things that will improve my life. Don't misunderstand; there is nothing wrong with reading purely for the joy of it. Novels have their place, but biographies of famous men and women contain information that can change lives.
When our students fail, we, as teachers, too, have failed.
I like that there are young people being given opportunities to explore and learn and grow and become themselves with a path that is associated with my mother. She would have liked that very much.
Music has a power of forming the character, and should therefore be introduced into the education of the young.
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.