Family Values

             Progress is natural. Yet somehow modern nations still retain kings; middle- America still demands science books without Darwin, and southern white children still eye black children suspiciously. These beliefs, formed under primitive technological and political circumstances, continue to this day because they are taught to children within the social framework that is least affected by the progressive tendencies of mass politics, increasingly diversified culture, and technological expansion. Conservatives demand that children are raised privately, because they fear the democratic implications of publicly raised children. The special cultural and apolitical qualities of a family-based development of children effectively preserve the anachronistic social and political beliefs that a public or state education would suffocate. Conservative's most important grasp of the future is not the Republican majority in the house, but their control of the home.
             Although school would seem to be the most important institution in developing a child's thinking, it is the home where a child first learns how to think. In her work on childhood development, The Invisible Heart, Nancy Folbre writes that, "The child's personality evolves as a composite of all things social...but a child's character is based entirely on the home." Later she elaborates by adding, "The first four years of a child's development are more crucial then her next fifty; no school curriculum can correct the patterns of thought that develop during infancy"(119). The practices and beliefs of the family are critical since the first six years of a child's development are spent almost entirely within the house, where family ties form the boundaries of the child's socialization. With the outside world completely unknown, the baby relies solely on its family to learn how to think.
             The isolation of the child from society ...

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Family Values. (1969, December 31). In MegaEssays.com. Retrieved 08:17, March 28, 2024, from https://www.megaessays.com/viewpaper/83162.html