Raising children is primarily a matter of teaching them what games to play.

The moment the little boy is concerned with which is a jay and which is a sparrow, he can no longer see the birds or hear them sing. He has to see and hear them the way his father wants him to. Father has good reasons on his side, since few people can afford to go through life listening to the birds sing, and the sooner the little boy starts his ‘education’ the better.

Parents, deliberately or unaware, teach their children from birth how to behave, think, feel and perceive. Liberation from these influences is no easy matter, since they are deeply ingrained and are necessary during the first two or three decades of life for biological and social survival.

We were schooled in acting in our childhood although it wasn't called that. It was called education, it was called upbringing but a great deal of it is schooling in acting. And you very soon learn as a child from your peers and from your parents what acts are appropriate and what are not. It is the concern of all parents that their child learns a role in life and has an identity by which the child can be recognised. It would be extraordinarily disconcerting if the child had one personality one day and another the next.

Education is to shake your personalities down and make you more or less constant in every sort of social environment that you enter so that everybody knows who you are.