From my experience earlier in life as a home daycare provider, I can honestly say that children start out in life as cooperative, compassionate human beings with a strong sense of justice. The culture in schools tends to pit them against one another competitively in the classroom and on the playground. That's where they develop hierarchies based on power and where they start to be willing to mistreat one another (and be mistreated by one another) in the effort to gain in power in the cultural environment where they find themselves; rewarded behaviors gain additional rewards and their sense of wrongness about it is dampened to the point that they forget life ever was or could have been different. As they grow up they impose these modes of being on younger ones, until eventually they take their place in the adult "dog eat dog" world. This is the legacy of injustice we give our children as their first inheritance.

So IMO the quesiton is not "How strong is your humanity?" but "What has to be done to humane persons to make them act out (and accept) inhumanity?" Studying it among adults is like asking why a horse runs about madly without considering the fire they're running from.

We say, "Kids can be so mean," but we don't usually ask how they get that way; we accept it as if they are born that way. They weren't.

For more, see "internalized adultism" at www.rc.org.

~Susan