Life & Wisdom Quote by James P. Hogan

Hogan is doing a sly reversal: the child as default rationalist, the adult as damaged goods. It’s a line that flatters our nostalgia for innocence while quietly accusing the institutions that manufacture “crooked thinking” on schedule. By calling kids “born logical,” he borrows the aura of science and engineering (a Hogan hallmark in hard SF) to frame irrationality not as nature but as culture: learned habits, inherited myths, social scripts, ideological loyalty tests. The verb choice matters. Adults “carve” ruts into their minds, an image of repeated motion turning thought into a track you can’t easily leave. Logic isn’t an achievement here; it’s the baseline that gets overwritten.

The subtext is less about child development than about epistemology and power. If crooked thinking must be taught, then someone benefits from teaching it. That someone might be parents, schools, religions, media ecosystems, national myths - any system that rewards conformity over curiosity. Hogan’s tone is crisp and prosecutorial, suggesting a society that trains people to defend beliefs rather than examine them. It’s also a quiet defense of the genre he wrote in: science fiction as a tool for re-opening those ruts, imagining alternative rules, letting first principles breathe.

Contextually, coming from a late-20th-century writer skeptical of authority, the line reads like a cultural diagnosis of modern adulthood: not merely stressed or distracted, but habituated into irrationality. The sting is that “logical” isn’t a compliment to children; it’s an indictment of what we do to them.