Parenting & Family Quote by R. Buckminster Fuller

Fuller takes a scalpel to a familiar parental fantasy: that success is something you can install in a child like software. In a single sentence he lines up the respectable trophies of upbringing - knowledge, polish, verbal fluency - and then exposes the quieter deficit underneath them: virtue, conduct, character. The jab isn’t anti-intellectual; it’s anti-substitution. He’s accusing modern parenting of confusing the performance of competence with the practice of goodness.

The phrasing matters. “Bestow knowledge” sounds like a gift handed down from above, a credentialed transfer. “Virtue,” by contrast, can’t really be bestowed; it’s cultivated, modeled, rehearsed under pressure. Fuller’s syntax makes that imbalance feel structural, not accidental: parents default to what can be taught, measured, recited. “The art of speaking well” is the perfect stand-in for the social economy of appearances - the kid who interviews well, presents well, wins rooms. “Doing well” is messier, harder to stage, less rewarded in the short term.

Then he lands on “manners,” a word that can read quaint until you realize he’s using it as an everyday proxy for ethics: how you move through the world when no one is grading you. Coming from an inventor obsessed with systems, design, and long-term survival, the subtext is pragmatic: a society optimized for cleverness but indifferent to decency will eventually break. Fuller isn’t moralizing from a pulpit; he’s diagnosing a cultural misallocation of attention - raising rhetoricians when we need responsible actors.