Education Quote by Elizabeth Janeway

Janeway slides a quiet blade under one of our favorite comfort stories: that growing up is mainly a natural process with a few cultural accessories. She insists it is the other way around. Humans arrive under-programmed, and the family - that supposedly private, cozy unit - becomes the operating system. It is a line that sounds humane until you notice the trapdoor: if relationships replace instincts, then bad relationships don’t just hurt, they misbuild the person.

The intent isn’t to romanticize “connection.” It’s to downgrade biology as an alibi. Animals can blame instinct; humans can’t. What looks like temperament, morality, even “personality,” becomes partly an artifact of who had power over you early on, what they modeled, what they withheld. Janeway’s most pointed move is the pivot from description to evaluation: “how good are these connections?” That question turns the family from sacred institution into a testable environment, one that can be nurturing, negligent, coercive, or simply mismatched.

Context matters: Janeway wrote through an era when postwar domestic ideology sold the family as stability itself, while feminist and social critics were prying open its realities - gendered labor, childrearing norms, silence around abuse, the psychological costs of conformity. Her subtext is political as much as personal. If social relations are destiny, then the quality of those relations is not merely a private concern; it’s a public one, shaping citizens, workers, lovers. The line leaves you with an unsettling implication: “human nature” may be, to an alarming degree, home-made.