Walt Whitman Quotes

There was a child went forth everyday, And the first object he looked upon and received with wonder or pity or dread, that object he became, And that object became part of him for the day or a certain part of the day... or for many years or stretching cycles of years.

America's future will be determined by the home and the school. The child becomes largely what he is taught; hence we must watch what we teach, and how we live.

A man's character always takes its hue, more or less, from the form and color of things about him.

If someone arrives, fully functional yet a tabula rasa, how does their environment influence, educate, even mold them? And if that is a nurture question, then where does that character's nature fit in? How does that manifest?

When I was a boy, there were three influences on children. The school, the family, and the church. Now there is a fourth---television.

Kids are a product of their environment.

I think anybody, not just children, is a product of a great environment. If you put them in a better environment from a sad situation, nine times out of 10, they'll go in the right direction.

Women are presented with a very narrow aspect of the female narrative. And now we live in a culture and a time where it gets to us very quickly and very young. So how do you maintain in a child that sense of unique identity before they get thrown all that is projected on them?

Yes, you will. And I will warn you now that not their blood but your suspicion might build evil in them. They will be what you expect of them…I think when a man finds good or bad in his children he is seeing only what he planted in them after they cleared the womb." "You can’t make a race horse of a pig." "No," said Samuel, "but you can make a very fast pig.

Children notice things first, people later.

Children learn to speak Male or Female the way they learn to speak English or French.

No child is bad from the beginning, they only imitate their atmosphere.

The child becomes a person through work.

The question for the child is not Do I want to be good? but Whom do I want to be like?

Our first impressions are generated by our experiences and our environment, which means that we can change our first impressions... by changing the experiences that comprise those impressions.

Television is the third parent.

Whatever landscape a child is exposed to early on, that will be the sort of gauze through which he or she will see all the world afterwards.

The growing child must derive a vitalizing sense of reality from the awareness that his individual way of mastering experience (his ego synthesis) is a successful variant of a group identity and is in accord with its space-time and life plan.

...belief has a second edge. If there are ten thousand medieval peasants who create vampires by believing them real, there may be one - probably a child - who will imagine the stake necessary to kill it. But a stake is only stupid wood; the mind is the mallet which drives it home.

But we have been taught to see before our eyes have found out a way of seeing for themselves.

You send your child to the schoolmaster, but 'tis the schoolboys who educate him. You send him to the Latin class, but much of histuition comes, on his way to school, from the shop- windows.

Lifestyles and sex roles are passed from parents to children as inexorably as blue eyes or small feet.

How to begin to educate a child. First rule: leave him alone. Second rule: leave him alone. Third rule: leave him alone. That is the whole beginning.

It's never too late to move to a good place to try to improve your child's outcomes in adulthood.

As soft wax is apt to take the stamp of the seal, so are the minds of young children to receive the instruction imprinted on them.