Outsourcing and Rampant Corruption
1. Should Children Be Encouraged to Think for Themselves?
Should children be encouraged to think for themselves? This is one of those questions that seems to invite an immediate and emphatic, almost dismissive answer. “Of course children should be encouraged to think for themselves. We’re not raising robots, after all. What’s wrong with you? How dare you ask such a silly question!” Well, my personal defects aside, the question is far more difficult than it first appears.
For one thing, we should all learn to be particularly cautious when our response to a question is too strong. The tone of an answer like the one just given is often an indicator of two rather unpleasant truths. First, the person is far less sure of his answer than he would like to be, but he covers this uncertainty over with emotional emphasis. He is scared that he might be wrong, and he doesn’t want to entertain the possibility of investigating a weak point in his thinking, so he raises his voice in psychological self-defense. Second, and closely related, we often become emotional in resisting ideas which expose our own flaws. We seek to deflect even our own eyes from looking at our actual practices by more loudly using our voice to proclaim our “true” values.
See, no parent in America today would likely affirm the idea that children should not be encouraged to think for themselves. But a closer look at the way they treat their children would reveal the clear fact that they do not practice what they yell. Children are told to do things “because I said so,” “because I’m the parent,” or even, in a Christian home, “because God says.” Personally, I think all these phrases serve the quite useful purpose of teaching a child about authority, as long as they’re not used exclusively in situations where the parents really have no idea why the thing they’re commanding is correct. Yet, even though we all know that children should sometimes be told to think as we do, it’s still not something we’re
Should children be encouraged to think for themselves? This is one of those questions that seems to invite an immediate and emphatic, almost dismissive answer. “Of course children should be encouraged to think for themselves. We’re not raising robots, after all. What’s wrong with you? How dare you ask such a silly question!” Well, my personal defects aside, the question is far more difficult than it first appears.
For one thing, we should all learn to be particularly cautious when our response to a question is too strong. The tone of an answer like the one just given is often an indicator of two rather unpleasant truths. First, the person is far less sure of his answer than he would like to be, but he covers this uncertainty over with emotional emphasis. He is scared that he might be wrong, and he doesn’t want to entertain the possibility of investigating a weak point in his thinking, so he raises his voice in psychological self-defense. Second, and closely related, we often become emotional in resisting ideas which expose our own flaws. We seek to deflect even our own eyes from looking at our actual practices by more loudly using our voice to proclaim our “true” values.
See, no parent in America today would likely affirm the idea that children should not be encouraged to think for themselves. But a closer look at the way they treat their children would reveal the clear fact that they do not practice what they yell. Children are told to do things “because I said so,” “because I’m the parent,” or even, in a Christian home, “because God says.” Personally, I think all these phrases serve the quite useful purpose of teaching a child about authority, as long as they’re not used exclusively in situations where the parents really have no idea why the thing they’re commanding is correct. Yet, even though we all know that children should sometimes be told to think as we do, it’s still not something we’re