In case it is not obvious, whilst many of these quotations are consistent with Taking Children Seriously, many of them are not. Sometimes it is just interesting that that person said it, or it is interesting for some other reason.
“A lot of parents will do anything for their children, except let them be themselves.”
– Banksy
“Telling someone their child is obedient is (usually) meant as a compliment. But an obedient adult? Not quite so attractive is it? We have other words for that, doormat being one of them.”
– Annalisa Barbieri, Since when did obedience become the epitome of good parenting?, 2012, in The Guardian
In his 1990 book, Unfathomed Knowledge, Unmeasured Wealth: on universities and the wealth of nations, published by Open Court, W. W. Bartley, III gives a list of things Karl Popper “taught us in his formal lectures and in his writings” then writes:
“In his seminars he taught us:
• To do your work, you must have a scientific or intellectual problem, not a topic.
• Do not try to be path-breaking or original. Find a problem that excites you. Work on it and take what you get.
• You must want to communicate to your reader; you must be clear, never use big words or anything needlessly complicated. (‘Write it for Tirzah,’ he would say—referring to Agassi’s eight-year-old daughter.) Do not use logical symbols or mathematical formulae, for instance, if you can possibly avoid it. Know logic, but do not parade it.
• It is immoral to be pretentious, or to try to impress the reader or listener with your knowledge. For you are ignorant. Although we may differ in the little things we know, in our infinite ignorance we are all equal.
• Do not be attached to your ideas. You must expose yourself, put yourself at risk. Do not be cautious in your ideas. Ideas are not scarce: there are more where they came from. Let your ideas come forth: any idea is better than no idea. But once the idea is stated, you must try not to defend it, not to believe it, but to criticise it and to learn from discovering its defects. Ideas are only conjectures. What is important is not the defence of any particular conjecture but the growth of knowledge.
• So be scrupulous in admitting your mistakes: you cannot learn from them if you never admit that you make them.”
– W. W. Bartley, III, 1990, Unfathomed Knowledge, Unmeasured Wealth: On universities and the wealth of nations, Chapter 9: The Popperian philosophy and the difficult man who started it all, pp. 158-159
“We are born princes, and the civilizing process makes us into frogs.”
– Eric Berne
“To go to school in a Summer morn.
Oh, it drives all joy away!
Under a cruel eye outworn,
The little ones spend the day —
In sighing and dismay.”
– William Blake, c. 1790, The Schoolboy
“Many of us learned as children that being fully alive was bad and you got hurt for it, so we deadened ourselves.”
– Brad Blanton, 1994, Radical Honesty, p. xxvi
“Children lose their innocence from being repeatedly hurt in the natural course of life, even if they do not have abusive parents. If the adults who surround a child are intent on teaching them, the open innocence of childhood is even more quickly obliterated. Hatred is passed on from generation to generation through what we teach children ‘for their own good.’”
– Brad Blanton, 1994, Radical Honesty, p. 29
“Most of us never overcome the butchering of our upbringing enough to discover how to tolerate the experience of freedom and learn to relish having it.”
– Brad Blanton, 1994, Radical Honesty, p. 87
“Being a parent is the epitome of the unknown. Be-friending the unknown won’t make it all better, but it can make for quite the game.”
– John Blase, 2013, Know When to Hold ’Em: The high stakes game of fatherhood, Chapter 3: Chancey faith
“You can’t raise your kids exactly like you were raised. Besides, you don’t want them to turn out exactly like you anyway.”
– John Blase, 2013, Know When to Hold ’Em: The high stakes game of fatherhood, Chapter 11: A different road
“Reactions tend to shut our children down.”
– John Blase, 2013, Know When to Hold ‘Em: The high stakes game of fatherhood, Chapter 2: Response-able fathering
“The effects of infantile instruction are, like syphilis, never completely cured.”
– Robert Briffault, 1931
“Perhaps we have been mistaken; perhaps children are competent.”
– Margaretha Berg Brodén, quoted in Jesper Juul, 1995, 2001, Your Competent Child
“Children’s self-expression, before it is repressed, corrupted, or distorted by overcontrolling parents, is free and exuberant, a natural part of being alive and responding to the world.”
– Judith Brown, 1986, “I only want what’s best for you”: A parent’s guide to raising well-adjusted children, pp. 42-43
“Do you hear the children weeping, O my brothers,
Ere the sorrow comes with years…
They are weeping in the playtime of others,
In the country of the free.”
– Elizabeth Barrett Browning, 1843, Excerpt: The Cry of The Children
“There are fathers so unnatural that the whole of their lives seems to be devoted to giving their children reason for being consoled when they die.”
– Jean De La Bruyere, 1688, Caractères, XI
“I sometimes wonder how it was that the mischief done was not more clearly perceptible, and that the young men and women grew up as sensible and goodly as they did, in spite of the attempts almost deliberately made to warp and stunt their growth. Some doubtless received damage, from which they suffered to their life’s end; but many seemed little or none the worse, and some almost the better. The reason would seem to be that the natural instinct of the lads in most cases so absolutely rebelled against their training, that do what the teachers might they could never get them to pay serious heed to it.”
– Samuel Butler, 1872, Erewhon, p. 135
Return to alphabetical index of Quotations pages
Taking Children Seriously, ‘Quotations B’, https://takingchildrenseriously.com/quotations/