Pete, At 20:49 18/09/02 -0700, you wrote: (PV) <<<< Every dictator wants a mechanism to control the minds of the people via their early youth. Wasn't it a Jesuit who said "give me a child before the age of seven...". The virtue of our mutable brain is also our bane, when the mind of the child is programmed with ancient nonsense. A large part of enlightened and responsible parenthood is being careful to only cultivate in the child the ability to find their own answers, not to blindly buy into our own. But who are we to proclaim a monopoly on the truth? Even when they are so eager to adopt it, and it is so much less work, and less thinking, for both the parent and child. >>>>
But we need not over-rate the effect of early conditioning. Because research in social psychology (vis-a-vis the effect of genes) concentrated too much on various comparisons between identical and non-identical twins raised apart, raised together, and also of natural peers, simply not enough research was done using adopted children as controls. More recent research suggests very strongly that parental/authoritarian conditioning is far less powerful than the influence of peer groups from puberty onwards. It is the "loner" who's likely to retain the conditioning of his elders. (Incidentally, although the September 11 terrorists were young men deeply conditioned by fundamentalist imams [and no doubt there'll be more], if and when there are any revolutions by the young in Saudi Arabia or Iran then they're likely to be in favour of modernisation, western music, values and so forth [there is evidence for many small scale demonstrations of this 'heretical' nature in both countries so far], and not the values of their elders.) Keith ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- ------------ Keith Hudson, General Editor, Handlo Music, http://www.handlo.com 6 Upper Camden Place, Bath BA1 5HX, England Tel: +44 1225 312622; Fax: +44 1225 447727; mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] ________________________________________________________________________
