If our entertainment culture seems debased and unsatisfying, the hope is that our children will create something of greater worth.But it is as if we expect them to create out of nothing, like God, for the encouragement of creativity is in the popular mind, opposed to instruction. There is little sense that creativity must grow out of tradition, even when it is critical of that tradition, and children are scarcely being given the materials on which their creativity could work

Quintilian [educational writer in Rome around A.D. 100] thought that the earliest years of the child's life were crucial. Education should start earlier than age seven, within the family. It should not be so hard as to give the child an aversion to learning. Rather, these early lessons would take the form of play--that embryonic notion of kindergarten.

Could it be that those who were reared in the postwar years really were spoiled, as we used to hear? Did a child-centered generation, raised in depression and war, produce a self-centered generation that resents children and parenthood?

[17th-century] Puritans were the first modern parents. Like many of us, they looked on their treatment of children as a test of their own self-control. Their goal was not to simply to ensure the child's duty to the family, but to help him or her make personal, individual commitments. They were the first authors to state that children must obey God rather than parents, in case of a clear conflict.

Parents are used to being made to feel guilty about...their contribution to the population problem, the school tax burden, and declining test scores. They expect to be blamed by teachers and psychologists, if not by police. And they will be blamed by the children themselves. It is hardy a wonder, then, that they withdraw into what used to be called "permissiveness" but is really neglect.

In the years of the Roman Republic, before the Christian era, Roman education was meant to produce those character traits that would make the ideal family man. Children were taught primarily to be good to their families. To revere gods, one's parents, and the laws of the state were the primary lessons for Roman boys. Cicero described the goal of their child rearing as "self- control, combined with dutiful affection to parents, and kindliness to kindred.

We like the idea of childhood but are not always crazy about the kids we know. We like it, that is, when we are imagining our ownchildhoods. So part of our apparent appreciation of youth is simply envy.