Paul Goodman Quotes about Children

Wrong' training can be a very innocent thing. Consider a father who allows his child to read good books. That child may soon cease to watch television or go to the movies, nor will he eventually read Book-of-the-Month

Wrong' training can be a very innocent thing. Consider a father who allows his child to read good books. That child may soon cease to watch television or go to the movies, nor will he eventually read Book-of-the-Month Club selections, because they are ludicrous and dull. As a young man, then, he will effectually be excluded from all of Madison Avenue and Hollywood and most of publishing, because what moves him or what he creates is quite irrelevant to what is going on: it is too fine. His father has brought him up as a dodo.

Paul Goodman

Children, Father, Moving

Paul Goodman (2011). “Growing Up Absurd: Problems of Youth in the Organized Society”, p.144, New York Review of Books

The stultifying effect of the movies is not that the children see them but that their parents do, as if Hollywood provided a plausible adult recreation to grow up into.

Paul Goodman

Movie, Children, Growing Up

Paul Goodman (2011). “Growing Up Absurd: Problems of Youth in the Organized Society”, p.76, New York Review of Books

The "brightness" of the 15 percent might or might not indicate a profound feeling for the causes of things; it is largely verbal and symbol-manipulating, and is almost certainly partly an obsessional device not to know and touch risky matter, just as Freud long ago pointed out that the nagging questions of small children are a substitute for asking the forbidden questions.

Paul Goodman

Children, Long Ago, Profound

Growing Up Absurd" by Paul Goodman, (p. 85), 1956.

Paul Goodman Quotes about Children

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