In Praise of Prejudice. Theodore Dalrymple

       5

       The Effect of Pedagogy Without Prejudice

      IF ONE IS morally obliged to clear one’s mind of the detritus of the past, in order to become a fully autonomous moral agent, it would seem to follow that we have an obligation not to fill the minds of the young with any detritus of our own manufacture. It is hardly surprising, then, that we increasingly invest children with authority over their own lives, and at ever earlier ages. Who are we to tell them what to do? The word “pupil” has almost been eliminated from usage in the English language, and has been replaced with “student.” The two words have very different connotations. A pupil is under the tutelage or direction of someone who knows what the pupil, for his own good, ought to know and to learn; a student has matured to the point at which his own curiosity or ambition permit him to follow his own inclinations, at least to some extent, where his studies are concerned. Of course, there is, and ought to be, no sharp dividing line between these two phases of an educational career, any more than there is between infancy and childhood, childhood and adolescence, and adolescence and adulthood. The absence of clear demarcations, however, does not mean that there is no difference between infancy and adulthood. No doubt the length of the phases of an educational career ought to vary according to the characteristics of the person involved. Perhaps some children are so naturally curious, and with such an instinct for the important and useful, that they can be left unguided almost from the first. But unflattering as it may be for our conception of human nature, this cannot be true of most children, who are not self-propelling along the paths of knowledge and wisdom.

      Not all attempts to guide children on to these paths are successful, needless to say, as the disorder that prevails in so many of our schools amply testifies. But this in turn is evidence of a failure by parents to inculcate self-control in their offspring. And this is the result of investing their children with an authority to make choices and exercise vetoes as soon as they are able to express, or even to indicate them.

      An interesting, if unintended, illustration of this appeared in a recent edition of the most prestigious general medical journal in the world, The New England Journal of Medicine. An editorial considered the relation between the epidemic of childhood obesity that is afflicting America and the rest of the Western world (and, indeed, the affluent classes of the rest of the world), and the advertising for fatty, salty junk food directed at children. The editorial, in my view unexceptionally, came to the conclusion that such advertising should not be permitted. It did not, however, mention the underlying premise that made such advertising immoral: namely, that it aimed deliberately at children who were not yet sufficiently old or autonomous to assess its claims or resist its charms.

      It is difficult to know in advance what practical effect a ban on advertising junk food to children might have (I suspect it would be slight), but the editorial was very revealing of what, for lack of a better term, I shall call the Zeitgeist. For the editorial stated that the advertisements gave children the impression that the junk foods in question were made just for them, and that they as children knew best what was good for them, and should therefore be the arbiters of what they ate. And this, said the editorial, made it more difficult for parents to control their children’s diet.

      Not a word was said about parents’ proper authority over their own children. (We are speaking here of children of a very young age. According to the evidence, the obesity of children begins very early in their lives, well before anything that could possibly be construed as the age of reason. The pattern of overindulgence, principally in what is bad for them, is established before they go to school.) The author of the editorial regarded the television on which advertisements for junk food currently appear as a natural phenomenon, like the atmosphere, over the watching and influence of which parents could be expected to exercise no control. But what kind of parents, one might ask, is incapable of saying No when children want something they should not have?

      Lazy or sentimental parents, no doubt. They use junk food in much the same way as (though with far less excuse than) Victorian parents used Godfrey’s Cordial, that is to say opium in syrup, to stop the crying and screaming. But there is more to it than that. Anyone who has observed a mother in a shop or supermarket solicitously and even anxiously bending over a three- or four year-old child to ask him what he would like for his next meal will understand the sovereignty over choice that is now granted to those who have neither experience nor powers of discrimination enough to exercise it on the basis of anything other than the merest whim, without regard to the consequences. By abdicating their responsibility in this fashion, in the name of not passing on their own prejudices or preconceptions to their children, and not imposing their own view of what is right upon them, they enclose their children within the circle of their childish tastes. In the name of the struggle against prejudice and illegitimate authority, they instill a culinary prejudice that, though self-evidently harmful, is far more restrictive in the long run than any they might have instilled by the firm exercise of their authority; for, in the absence of experience, children will always choose the same thing, the thing that is most immediately attractive or gratifying to them.

      The precocity encouraged by too-early an assumption of the responsibility for making a choice, as if children were the customers of their parents rather their offspring, is soon followed by arrested development. A young child, constantly consulted over his likes and dislikes, learns that life is, and ought to be, ruled by his likes and dislikes. He is not free of prejudices just because he is free of his parents’ prejudices. On the contrary, he is a slave to his own prejudices. Unfortunately, they are harmful both to him as an individual, and to the society of which he is a member.