"If the child's mind was a tabula rasa — a clean slate upon which, as Mao Zedong once put it, 'the most beautiful characters could be written' -- then a person's character and mind-set would not be immutable and God-given, but shaped and honed in the environment."
— Smits, Rick
Author
Date
April 15, 2012
Metaphor
"If the child's mind was a tabula rasa — a clean slate upon which, as Mao Zedong once put it, 'the most beautiful characters could be written' -- then a person's character and mind-set would not be immutable and God-given, but shaped and honed in the environment."
Metaphor in Context
If the child's mind was a tabula rasa — a clean slate upon which, as Mao Zedong once put it, "the most beautiful characters could be written" -- then a person's character and mind-set would not be immutable and God-given, but shaped and honed in the environment. Nature would take a back seat to nurture. The idea of normality took root, and with it a nasty premise: If minds could be shaped, it followed that they could be well-shaped or ill-shaped with respect to some norm, naturally the greatest common denominator. Abnormality -- undesirable by definition -- could be remedied, since minds were putty. Left-handedness became an illness that needed curing.
Provenance
Reading
Citation
Rik Smits, "Lefties Aren't Special After All" New York Times (April 15, 2012), SR 8. <Link to NYTimes.com>
Theme
Blank Slate
Date of Entry
04/16/2012
