What Do We Really Teach Our Children?
It began with a movie.
The French Connection.
Raw. Brilliant. Dirty. A product of its time.
My daughter walked in just as a character said something appalling—a slur dropped without hesitation, like punctuation. Her eyes widened. “That’s racist,” she said.
And she was right.
But instead of brushing it off or excusing it with, “That’s just how it was back then,” we paused the movie. Sat in the silence for a second. I told her: “You're seeing the past with the eyes of the present. And that's good. That’s what thinking people do. But the past didn’t know it was the past.”
Because this wasn’t just about language or politics. This was about the entire question of what we pass on—what we actually give to our children in the name of education, morality, culture.
We think we’re teaching “values,” but most of the time, we’re just teaching adaptation—how to fit in, how to survive in the current system. But what happens when the system changes?
Jean Piaget once said that a child is not a vessel to be filled with knowledge, but an active builder of meaning. He studied how children construct an understanding of right and wrong—first through obedience, then through mutual respect, and later, through abstract principles. But this process doesn’t happen by command. It happens through real-life moral friction. By watching, stumbling, reflecting.
Later came Lawrence Kohlberg, who described six stages of moral development—from blind obedience to universal ethical principles. Most adults, he said, never get past stage four: the law-and-order stage. Fewer still reach stage six—the place where people can stand against unjust systems not because they’re rebels, but because their conscience won’t let them do otherwise.
When I think about what I want to pass on to my daughter, it’s not just the “rules of 2025.” Those will age, like fashion.
I want her to be able to see the structures that make those rules, the fears behind the moral panics, the unspoken pressures that shape what's allowed and what's taboo. I want her to ask: Is this just the way things are done—or is this the right thing to do?
Because the hard truth is: most of what we teach children is context-dependent.
But wisdom is not.
Wisdom is portable.
You can carry it into the future. Into another country. Another language. Another self.
So yes—we raise children within a culture. But we must give them the capacity to rise above it, too. To judge it gently, but clearly. And to forgive its limitations without inheriting them.
I want to raise someone who can walk into a new era and not feel lost.
Who can look at history not just with outrage, but with insight.
Who doesn’t confuse goodness with conformity.
That night, my daughter and I kept talking. Not about the movie. But about how you know when something is wrong—not because someone told you, but because you felt it. In your chest. Before the words. Before the rulebook.
Maybe that’s the only real inheritance we can give them:
Not fixed beliefs.
But the ability to ask the right kind of questions when someone like Popeye Doyle shows up.