Liberals Defining Conservatism — in Nursery School??
Oh, I’m just LOVING this little research study. Their claim?
In the 1960s Jack Block and his wife and fellow professor Jeanne Block (now deceased) began tracking more than 100 nursery school kids as part of a general study of personality.
The whiny kids tended to grow up conservative, and turned into rigid young adults who hewed closely to traditional gender roles and were uncomfortable with ambiguity.
The confident kids turned out liberal and were still hanging loose, turning into bright, non-conforming adults with wide interests. The girls were still outgoing, but the young men tended to turn a little introspective.
My complaints are many…..
- This study is based on 100 kids, born to 60s parents, in BERKELEY. That’s a valid sampling? Get real!
- Conservatives are “rigid…uncomfortable with ambiguity” where liberals are “hanging loose…bright, non-conforming with wide interests”? Oh, I don’t see any bias there…!
- What happened to kids who don’t fit either of the categories mentioned in the survey? What about the kid who is confident in himself but shy around others? Does he grow up to be a moderate? Libertarian?
Did anyone consider that those whiny, less confident kids, growing up in the 60s in Berkeley, were resisting free-wheeling, no-rules parents/teachers and grew up eventually to reject those ways? I’m telling you right now, if you don’t think a 3-4 year old can pick up on the parenting style they are dealing with, you know VERY LITTLE about young children.
Maybe kids in that situation who were “self-confident” were accepting of the way they were being raised, and followed through on that “who cares, I do what I want and you have to let me” philosophy all the way to their young adulthood?
As for only verifying these kids’ political leanings through young adulthood — Winston Churchill said so well:
Any man who is under 30, and is not a liberal, has no heart; and any man who is over 30, and is not a conservative, has no brains.
And Jo pipes in ….I grew up in a democratic household in southern Minnesota, but the first time I voted it was for a Republican president. To this day I vote republican / conservative, and believe I only have one liberal / democratic bone in my body (Has something to do with trees). Explain that from your study in a town so far removed from Southern Minnesota as you can be.
Explain how I grew up a whiney, free wheeling child that turned “ridged” with no self-confidence when I went conservative?? Try and tell the SGM that I have no confidence, he will laugh you off the planet.
Shouldn’t I have remained a “liberal, free-wheeling” democrat if raised “properly?”
Yeah … right.
Update by Trelaina — Michelle Malkin has a link to the full study and other bloggers who are commenting. I’ll definitely be reading a little of this today!
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basil’s blog
1Angel
wrote on 22 March 2006 at 21:49
Oh yea I’d luv to see the standard deviation and bell curvesssssss of their study..lolz..They were probably on weed when they did their “samplings”…Heh.