The Jesuits say something like, “Give me the child and I’ll show you the man.”
Like “I shall mold the child into my idea of the man”? “Regardless of who the child is and whether or not they are the appropriate clay for the final result I have in mind”? “Give me the child, whoever they are, and I will show you a man?”
Or does it mean like “give me the child and I will consider their traits and show you the man they will become"?
That’s the trouble with one-liners, too open to interpretation… I think the intended meaning is closer to the former, but I think I’m still a bit off. But when working from just a single sentence…
EDIT - We say “De pequenino é que se torce o pepino”. Lit., “you bend the cucumber from an early age”. So that it continues growing bent along a certain way, and by the time it’s fully grown, it’s got the recogniseable bend, instead of being straight. Meaning, children are molded into the adults they will become. Which of course begs all the questions of who decides that they are to be molded into certain shapes, and whether they are being molded or broken.
Maybe I’m bitter, though.
Not for myself personally, just for what I see around me at times.
EDIT - It’s a stupid saying, anyway. Cucumbers are pretty straight. So if you try to bend one, you break it, and if it works, you end up with a cucumber that doesn’t look like a cucumber. Unless that’s the point; to have a cucumber that is unique and individual and unlike the others.
…my head hurts now.
EDIT - ““as the twig is bent, so grows the tree.” Seems better…
It’s a famous quotation, though not famous enough for me to remember it word for word. Here’s what Wikiquote says:
- Give me the child for the first seven years and I will give you the man.
- Jesuit maxim widely attributed to Ignatius Loyola; according to Three Myths, by A. Beichman et al. (1981), p. 48, this saying was “attributed to him (perhaps mischievously) by Voltaire.”
The “mischievously” part might be because the expression is about how easily indoctrinated children are. Other websites attribute it to Aristotle. Sadly I don’t have any books mentioning this so can’t be sure.
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Thanks, for some reason those extra words make it more parseable to my brain even though the meaning is obviuosly unchanged. Brains are funny.
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