Parenting & Family Quote by Ralph Steadman

A Ralph Steadman line like this lands less as a policy argument than as a splattered indictment. He is a cartoonist of grotesque exaggeration and institutional mistrust, so “the kids” aren’t just children; they’re a stand-in for the next generation being processed. The phrasing does the work: “are not brought up” is passive on purpose, implying an ecosystem of parents, schools, media, and politics that can’t be pinned on a single villain. Nobody “raises” them into conformity; conformity just happens, like a stain.

The bite is in “minds of their own as individuals,” a redundancy that reads like a warning flare. Steadman isn’t merely asking for creativity; he’s insisting on personhood. By stacking “of their own” and “as individuals,” he suggests how thoroughly autonomy is being sanded down: even the concept of individuality has to be defended twice. It also hints at a culture that praises independence rhetorically while designing childhood around compliance, metrics, and safety-as-control.

Context matters: Steadman came up alongside the counterculture and chronicled power with corrosive humor, famously in the orbit of Hunter S. Thompson. From that vantage, education can look like early-stage PR for the status quo, training future adults to confuse good behavior with good judgment. The subtext isn’t nostalgia for some golden age of free-range genius; it’s suspicion of any system that treats young people as manageable risk rather than unpredictable citizens. The line’s intent is to provoke discomfort: if kids aren’t being taught to think, someone is teaching them what to think.