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Lessons In Obedience

As parents we fret and fume over our recalcitrant brats trying to teach them the importance of discipline and obedience. But our efforts may have been in vain in the end. In life's most decisive moments disobedience and chaos may be a better choice

That authority figures may not always be in the know or even know what they are supposed to is a realization that dawns on most of us while we are still young. Yet we continue to heed their flawed advise like we have been conditioned to do. In the totem pole of authoritativeness, parents come right at the top. A young child believes implicitly that their parents know it all and are incapable of being wrong. To live up to that image and expectation is hard enough.

Parents in the wired and networked age are additionally challenged to provide lessons to their wards that will stay fresh and relevant at least for eighty web years. This can be a very daunting task unless the parent is a visionary perhaps. Teaching our children what is good for them will depend on the trajectory of technological innovation and as such a challenge that many of us will not be quite up to.

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bharath said…
Just as much as that argument is tempting to buy, there is new theory around whats called fuzzy logic, which presents an alternative to well-informed decisions: If you make a fully informed decision, which means a whole lot of effort at collecting /all/ the information and /analysing/ them. You may not gain a /lot/ by choosing to instead use certain /rules of thumb/. Now our parents are handed down these rules of thumb precisely because it simplifies the whole process of parenting.

They present a lot of situations and cases where this is actually working. Of course it is not 'one theory fits all', but then we are only discussing a specific instances when parents are guided by "conventional wisdom". They don't use conventional instance when it comes to choice of which school to choose for innstance.

now, that is not my take or anything on this. but just an alternate view point that I am aware of.
9:56 AM
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