Rutger Bregman Quotes

The first idea that the child must acquire, in order to be actively disciplined, is that of the difference between good and evil.

Morality is often seen as an innovation, like agriculture and writing. From this perspective, babies are pint-sized psychopaths, self-interested beings who need to be taught moral notions such as the wrongness of harming another person.

In 'Reclaiming Virtue,' I argue that we have had an element missing in moral education. That element is 'affect.' Affect is simply the technical word for feeling or emotion.

Piaget is correct in assuming a culturally universal age development of a sense of justice, involving progressive concern for the needs and feelings of others and elaborated conceptions of reciprocity and equality.

It seems obvious that moral stages must primarily be the products of the child's interaction with others rather than the direct unfolding of biological or neurological structures.

How we become moral and understand good and bad, and how we overcome our impulse towards violence, is all really important to me, as a person.

If education is to develop human nature so that it may attain the object of its being, it must involve the exercise of judgment.

The formation of character in young people is educationally a different task from and a prior task to, the discussion of the great, difficult ethical controversies of the day.

For Aristotle, habits reigned supreme. The behaviors that occur unthinkingly are the evidence of our truest selves.

The most influential of all educational factors is the conversation in a child's home.

One has only as much morality as one has philosophy and poetry.

Our conscience is not the vessel of eternal verities. It grows with our social life, and a new social condition means a radical change in conscience.

The endeavor to understand is the first and only basis of virtue.

Morality is not only taught; it is caught.

It is sometimes easier to head an institute for the study of child guidance than it is to turn one brat into a decent human being.

I believe that the fight against crime starts in the home. Parents must take responsibility for their children and show them love and guidance from an early age so they learn to respect the rights of others.

Human models are more vivid and more persuasive than explicit moral commands.

The truth is, no matter how trying they become, babies two and under don't have the ability to make moral choices, so they can't be bad. That category only exists in the adult mind.

As a parent, you have to figure out how to shape your kid's character. You want to have human beings who learn about good character. You have to be able to see your child with clarity, see the good side and the bad side of them, and work on the bad side and make them better so they fulfill their potential.

There's no question that we have great value on the sanctity of the family, and there are a lot of competing visions about exactly how we teach a set of values and we teach skills to our children, especially in the early years when they're really forming their personalities, their personas, really.

My early research - I'm a social psychologist, and my early research was on how people make moral judgments. When I entered the field in 1987, everybody was looking at moral reasoning - how do kids reason about a moral dilemma? Should a guy steal a drug to save his wife's life?

Ours is an age of pedagogy. Anxious parents instruct their children more and more, at younger and younger ages, until they're reading books to babies in the womb.

Education is the art of making man ethical.

Morals are an acquirement -- like music, like a foreign language, like piety, poker, paralysis -- no man is born with them.

The child becomes largely what it is taught; hence we must watch what we teach it, and how we live before it.