What Kids Can Teach Grown-ups About Right and Wrong

Children are always a perfect case study in duality. They can be angels one moment and devils the next, almost seemingly on a whim. But I think there is truth in the notion that they contain a sort of purity that escapes us as adults. And it is not sparkling eyes or soft skin that I'm talking about but something inside. For a child anything truly is possible because they are not programmed yet. I know that analogy is not perfect but it is in my mind the best one possible. Almost every intelligent adult in this country ahs at least one area where their intelligence seems unable to pierce. Why? Programming. This is where the popular notion in the seventies to "never trust anyone over thirty" came from.

If I could I would like to take a brief moment to mention the many ways in which children are not good role models for right and wrong. Their conscience is not concrete enough to have much sway over them, and even if it speaks loudly it does not condemn actions much past the moment the moral transgression occurs. Their wills are so intense that they will assert themselves through whatever means necessary. No sort of coherent moral code is developed or articulated. In many situations children show great weakness of character in terms of giving in to peer pressure. In a child's world the presence of bullies is especially pronounced and often it can seem as if things operated under Viking Law.

But there are ways in which they are undoubtedly better, and while we can hope for them to naturally grow beyond the problems listed above, history does not provide much hope for us in terms of reverting our fallacies back to their untarnished state. I think there are thousands of ways in which we fall short of the intuitive understanding of right and wrong a child often displays, but nowhere more so than in terms of legislating the behavior of our neighbors.

This is something that a child would never think of. For a child the only violations that mean anything is the one that occurs directly and physically between them and another individual. Notions like controlling the activities another engages in outside of their presence would be foreign and intuitively rejected by a child. Despite all the programming adults try to drill into them, children's natural inclination will always be toward freedom. They are too busy running through the whirlwind of their life to stop and develop views that take control of them to the point where they invade the sanctity of their neighbor's privacy. Those are things that only occur after you slow down, get bored and think of things through the prism of some sort of adult prejudice.

In terms of absence from genuine prejudice children really are more pure. They are what the Latins refer to as tabu la rossa, operating from their capabilities and not their prejudices, which we serve to infect them with left and right. Though these do take hold to some minor degree during youth, it is mostly just empty repetition. There is no true prejudice. The only time most kids really get cruel is when their will is denied; as these are the first instance of this, and sting the most.

I am of the opinion that every generation more children slip through the cracks with an open mind still intact, and that the means for a child to free his mind are becoming more readily available all the time. What a library card did for my parents the Internet will do for me and what it does for me some other form of technology will do for his child, times ten. If only we could have the purity of perspective we had as children, with the developed mental faculties of our adult selves, the perfect marriage! And I think there are humans who have acheievd this, with more arriving every generation. Their voices always stand out. This of course is a great source of dismay for the repressors who control things now, but it should be heartening to those of us who care about future. The rebellious nature of youth combined with its absolutist ideologies are something we as a society need to tap into if we ever want to truly evolve. And to those who would ignore this and simply see these times when youth disagrees with you as more reason to weep for the future, I would advise that you would be better served to take a look around and save your tears for the present.