Parenting & Family Quote by Gilbert Highet

Parenthood, in Gilbert Highet's formulation, isn’t primarily biology, affection, or authority; it’s curriculum. Calling the parent-child bond "essentially" based on teaching is a deliberate narrowing move, the kind a mid-century humanist makes when he wants to rescue family life from sentimentality and return it to craft. Highet spent his career arguing for education as civilization’s transmission belt, and he drags the home into that same moral architecture: the family as the first school, the parent as the first pedagogue.

The word "relation" matters. It’s not "love" or "duty" but a structure, a set of roles that can succeed or fail. "Based on" implies foundation rather than ornament; teaching isn’t an occasional lecture, it’s the load-bearing element holding the relationship together. That framing has an edge: it quietly demotes raw nurture to something less defining than formation. The subtext is both bracing and slightly austere: if you’re not teaching, you’re not fully parenting.

Context sharpens the stakes. Highet wrote in an era anxious about mass culture, weakened classics, and the outsourcing of childrearing to institutions and media. The line doubles as a defense of parental responsibility against the expanding influence of schools, radios, and later televisions. It also anticipates today’s fights over values education: who gets to teach what, and whether "teaching" includes ethics, taste, and citizenship, not just homework help.

It works because it flatters parents with purpose while warning them that every interaction instructs. Even silence teaches.