"Children are remarkable for their intelligence and ardor, for their curiosity, their intolerance of shams, the clarity and ruthlessness of their vision"
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Children, in Huxley's hands, aren't cherubs or blank slates; they're unsparing critics with fresh eyes and no patience for adult theater. The line flatters childhood, but it's also a quiet indictment of grown-up life: we build elaborate systems of politeness, hierarchy, and self-protective lies, then act shocked when a kid cuts through them in one blunt question. Calling children "remarkable for their intelligence and ardor" refuses the sentimental tradition that treats them as merely innocent. Their power is cognitive and moral: curiosity as engine, intolerance of shams as ethical stance.
The phrasing does sly work. "Clarity and ruthlessness" borrows from the vocabulary of warfare and surgery, suggesting that honesty isn't gentle. Children don't negotiate with hypocrisy; they expose it. Huxley, a novelist fascinated by social conditioning and manufactured consent, is implicitly contrasting the child's untrained perception with the adult's domesticated one. We learn to accept "shams" because shams are socially useful: they keep families calm, institutions stable, and egos intact. The child threatens that stability precisely by not understanding why a falsehood is necessary.
Context matters: Huxley wrote in an era increasingly defined by mass propaganda, industrialized education, and the modern state's talent for shaping desires. Against that backdrop, the child's "vision" reads less like a romantic ideal and more like a vanishing human capacity. The subtext isn't that children are always right; it's that they see what we trained ourselves not to see, and that training is the real story.
The phrasing does sly work. "Clarity and ruthlessness" borrows from the vocabulary of warfare and surgery, suggesting that honesty isn't gentle. Children don't negotiate with hypocrisy; they expose it. Huxley, a novelist fascinated by social conditioning and manufactured consent, is implicitly contrasting the child's untrained perception with the adult's domesticated one. We learn to accept "shams" because shams are socially useful: they keep families calm, institutions stable, and egos intact. The child threatens that stability precisely by not understanding why a falsehood is necessary.
Context matters: Huxley wrote in an era increasingly defined by mass propaganda, industrialized education, and the modern state's talent for shaping desires. Against that backdrop, the child's "vision" reads less like a romantic ideal and more like a vanishing human capacity. The subtext isn't that children are always right; it's that they see what we trained ourselves not to see, and that training is the real story.
Quote Details
| Topic | Youth |
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