In Praise of Prejudice. Theodore Dalrymple
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a duty of restraint, had not been inculcated in her as a prejudice, and it was now unlikely that she would ever learn it, let alone conform her behavior to it. The less than encouraging consequence was that she would continue to see all human relations as a power struggle that she was likely, on most occasions, to lose, given her relative poverty, lack of education, vulnerability and exploitability as a single mother, and utter dependence for her sustenance on a state bureaucracy for which she was but a number, with all the resultant frustration, misery, and victimization that follows from such a position.
Another girl, telling her interviewer why she did not like school, said:
all the teachers made you stand up when they walked into the room. Why should I stand up? I don’t stand up for my [separated] parents, so why am I gonna stand up for them? It was a—very much, you’re the child, I’m the teacher.
Contained in this passage is the assumption that, since all people are created equal, all social relations must be conducted on the same and equal basis: that what is appropriate with one’s parents (not, of course, honor or obedience) is appropriate with everyone, in all circumstances. Authority derives from drawing breath, by the secular equivalent of divine providence—that is to say, by natural right. Not surprisingly, it comes hard to such people that the world in general is not as interested in them as the people in their immediate circle are. And when this attitude of inherent authority has entered the fabric of the presuppositions of everyone around them, it is again not surprising that when teachers inform parents of the misconduct of their offspring, they, the parents, take it as a personal insult and blame not their children, who are the outer limits of their own egos, as they would once have done, but the teachers and the school, who have committed the crime of lèse-majesté . A blind prejudice in favor of constituted authority has been replaced by a blind prejudice that authority, other than one’s own, is inherently illegitimate.
No one would suggest that parents ought to have unyielding faith in teachers that is impervious to evidence of individual malignity; but a prejudice that, when teachers complain of the conduct of a child, they are more likely to be in the right than in the wrong, would conduce overall to the improvement, rather than to the deterioration, of a child’s conduct.
We can rid ourselves of any particular attitude to any given question, no doubt, but we cannot give up having any attitude whatsoever towards it.
8
The Cruel Effect of Not Instilling the Right Prejudices
THE GIRLS INTERVIEWED in the previously discussed report were in many ways in an unenviable, indeed pitiable, situation. For the most part, they came from precisely the kind of homes that they were so obviously in the process of reproducing:
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