In reacting against that Steve, you are every bit as influenced by it as the most enthusiastic believer. Perhaps more so.

But that's as true in all aspects of education, and in other situations. Whatever the intended message may be - and there always is an intended message - it's quite likely to have the opposite effect.

The cartoonist Feifer had a strip I remember - a man saying he realised his son reacted against what he said, so, hoping to get him to grow up with liberal beliefs, for years he used to say stuff designed to make him react that way, racist, sexist stuff and so forth. Than when the kid had grown up he told him that he'd been thinking it over, and now he realised that his son was right in his liberal views. "We used to argue all the time - now we don't seem to have anything to say to each other..."