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PARTISAN REVIEW
venereal disease, ...employment," and other matters that will "signifi–
cantly affect a child's future, ...a competent child should be permitted
to
assert his or her own interests." This idea is underlined in the case of
parents by the recent discovery that babies are perceptive virtually at
birth, which gets translated by many childrearing experts into such for–
mulations as "the competent baby," or "the information-organizing
individual," ideas whose climax was capped by two experts, Alison
Gopnik and Andrew Meltzoff, when they wrote in a book called
Words,
Thoughts, and Theories
(MIT Press,
1997)
that babies form "a succes–
sion of theories about people and the world" which they then test by
experimenting. "We can't help but be struck by how similar [infant]
behavior is to the behavior we normally associate with scientists."
One might suppose, then, that these "baby geniuses" (the title given
by Kay Hymowitz to one of her book's chapters) would require the
most attentive upbringing and education, but one would be most seri–
ously mistaken. For,
mirabile dictu,
such babies just teach themselves.
And what they do not, or cannot, teach themselves (from the multipli–
cation tables to American history) is no longer, in this great new world
they are in the process of making, worth bothering with. Put it all
together, children's "rights" and children's "genius," and what it spells,
plain as day, is not freedom for the kiddies but fully sanctioned libera–
tion for parents and teachers.
Need it be said that liberation for parents and teachers spells a kind
of sapping listlessness for the young? They move listlessly, they speak
listlessly, their entertainments are often listless ones, and their sexual
energy is squashed and misshapen under a heavy, soggy blanket of per–
mission. The result of this last is something to make you weep: it seems
from the kids' own accounts of the matter that whenever sex threatens
to rear its ugly head, they quickly move into crowd formation for safety;
and when it can no longer be avoided, there ensues a kind of resigned
"hooking up" (the kids' term) in which some girl will simply relieve
some boy by means of fellatio.
"Anticultural" is an illuminating term for what is going on with
America's young, except for the fact that something is missing from it.
And that is, that these neglected children-which is after all the plain
brutal term for it-are themselves the offspring of a generation of
neglected children . The idea that American society had no tradition of
any value
to
hand on to its young was one that reached full-throated
expression in the sixties. The baby boomers as newborns were not
likened by anyone to scientists, but the idea that their opinions were an
essential part of their education was already coming into full flower.
