Spock:  I have said a thousand times, I would be proud if my book was instrumental in bringing about these characteristics of modern, thoughtful, independent thinking of idealistic, courageous youth.   But I don't think it has much to do with it.   I think that the shift to a more understanding attitude toward child-rearing, to the realization that children themselves are not barbarians, but want to grow up and become more and more responsible adults. This recognition began about the turn of the century and my book didn't appear until 45 years later. I have also made the point I've been trying for the last 15 years to counteract the tendency toward guilty permissiveness on the part of some college-educated parents.   I've tried strenuously, and I don't see any evidence that I've done much good. Now I do think that my book is humane, it favors an understanding attitude toward children, and a generally democratic spirit.   In this sense it helped make parents comfortable about going ahead with this philosphy with which they might have otherwise felt uncomfortable. . .
Radical students of today, far from having an authoritarian bringing up, had generally speaking a most liberal up-bringing.   Now, this came as a surprise to me because I always thought of revolt as being against authoritarianism, and this shows that basically young people must revolt.   If you are held down relatively little, then you are able to go further with your revolt than if you are authoritatively restricted.   When you are satified to do just a little bit of a revolt, you get only a couple of feet away from where your parents' position was.
btf: What do you think of youth's "alternative culture"--a term which applies to the broad range of activity by young people, the hippie movement, the political left, and all its manifestations. . . ?
Spock:   I think that changes of hair and dress style are
inevitable and are absolutely harmless, not worth getting excited about for five minutes.   I think that it is fine to try living in communes, if people want to.    I think that a person can't help being restricted by the traditions of his own childhood, and the kind of traditions he has during his professional career. I begin to become a little uneasy about drastically changing the conditions of child-rearing.   I don't mean germs, and I don't mean rugs on the floor. I mean things like turning children over to others in large numbers, because I think that with any significant difference in the spirit of raising children you are bound to get personality changes. .
I always remember one of the psychiatric consultants from England who was working with the Arab Israeli army in the first Israeli war.   And it was fascinating to see what has been the effect of the kibbutz child-rearing.   He pointed out that these idealistic parents of these young kids, idealists from Europe who had settled in Palestine between WW1 and WWII, though they were tremendously proud of. . . . the discipline, the flexibility, the followership qualities, the leadership qualities of this kibbutz-reared generation, the man who was talking to us told us that when he spoke with the parents, sometimes a wistfulness would come over one of these idealists parents and they'd say "The only trouble is they're not Jews. "  Meaning that the personality types had been changed quite significantly by this much less-tight method of rearing children.
btf:  Do you think more repression will come?
Spock:  I don't think it's going to get anywhere.   All the evidence I see says that the more you.try to repress the young, the more suspicious and determined you make them.   I don't think they're going to succeed.   The only change back to more conventional ways will come through purely emotional roots when people get older, and we haven't seen that yet. blue-tail fly
btf:  Isn't that part of the reason why people are trying to build some other alternative?
tock:  Well, I don't think you have to change.   I'm an example of the fact.   As I got older, I got more radical every decade.. After all, there have always been older liberals and radicals.   So, I'm not threatening young people like some older people do: 'You wait,  you'll come around to our point of view' You don't have to.   But I think that the test of the newer methods that are now being discussed will come by one seeing what kind of children are created, and what kinds of difficulties parents have in creating them.   And another proof of the pudding will be, what will these young people feel like doing when rearing their children.   What they back away from some of their other ideas, simply because they are in a stage different of emotional development?
I've said many times, the only possible hope of the world is that here are young people questioning everything, people able to see that we are sliding toward internal chaos and toward nuclear war.
So, I think it's marvelous that young people are the way they are.   I think that maybe it's easier for me to accept that than it is for me to accept an entirely new way of child-rearing. Perhaps this is what brings out my conservatism.   I think it boils down to this--as I've become 65, have I become more and more stodgy just because of my age, or am I able to speak out of wisdom? And nobody ever knows.   It only seems like our wisdom, but the outsider can only see that it's just clinging to what was part of the past.   I was considered a radical--I'm the person who brought the specifics of Freudian concepts into child-rearing and that was considered quite daring at the time. Just because a person is radical at one stage doens't mean that he stays radical.
Man is meant to acquire idealsim, spirituality, creativity,  especially during the three-to-six-year-old period.   And man is in trouble today, not only because he doesn't sufficiently recognize his vicious tendencies, his aggressiveness and his paranoia, and power-craving.   His life is just as much troubled today because he doesn't recognize that he is potentially noble, do you see what I mean?
But he's accepted himself as a materialist, and even the young people who reject materialism, still, I think, keep themselves from understanding man by being terribly suspicious of a word like spirituality, or idealism, or creativity, because these are words that seem tainted with hypocrisy, because young people identify them with their parents. What I would say--as I've tried to in the 5th chapter of this book--Decent and Indecent, to be published ir January)--is that man is natuarlly spiritual, naturally altruistic, and naturally creative.   And we have to recognize this and cultivate it, otherwise he destroys himself.
btf:   Well, how would you reconcile such problems as environmental pollution and nuclear war if man is so altruistic?
ck:  Nuclear war because man doesn't recognize his viciousness, his aggressivemess, his power-craving, and his self-serving thinking.   This is why Americans are able to say,  'We're good guys. We're in VN to.save them. '  This is self-serving thinking.   Covering up our own power-grab by saying its the communists that we're protecting the South Vietnamese against.   But I also think that the reason that our education is failing, is that the only place you can learn moral attitudes at universities is to go to teach-ins.   It isn't respectable for teachers to talk about the moral aspects of their subjects now; it's certainly not academically respectable, professional.   The whole academic profession is still fighting the battle of separation of church and state.   This was won long ago. The schools have fought so long to get rid of the church -it's like a Maginot line mentality--No, no professor can talk about rights and wrongs, you have to set
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