How often do we hear about the various forces out there corrupting children and then ignore the fact that despite all our fretting very few are ever actually "corrupted"? It's no mistake that people do this--the fear of children being corrupted sticks in our heads better than when they actually are. Imagination takes precedence over sight. In reality, the majority that grow up to be average adults easily pass right through the social cognition of most people and the few that are corrupted by these forces usually don't constitute any real threat to civilization anyways. So why are we spending our time fretting?
Here's an example I stumbled on today. Children's films are often dripping with various political messages or ideologies. When filmmakers decide to make a simple story out of a series of plot devices to push a certain message (such as "save the rainforest"), with a few New Age beliefs mixed in, suddenly you have a lot of angry adults hemming and hawing about the "leftist propaganda" smeared all over children's media and how every child who sees it is going to grow up corrupted by it inevitably. Likewise, mix in some religious elements or conservative ideologies, against homosexuality for instance, and suddenly there's an outcry from the other side about how children will grow up to be intolerant. Either way, it seems children are always "raised" by the adherents and "corrupted" by the opposition--two trajectories defined by adults, not by children.
Each side of the adult divide seems to have it's own ideas about what a vile thing political correctness is, they just can't seem to identify what exactly is politically correct. Have you then ever stopped to wonder about whether or not the kids are actually corrupted by such implicit "propaganda" or "intolerance?" Such a question doesn't normally factor into the binary vision of most adults so long as the other side is seen as the politically correct oppressor and the corrupter of the youth. In reality, the children who are supposedly being fought over to win their hearts and minds either don't care about these implicit messages or don't understand them anyways. This isn't to say kids don't or can't understand these things, it's just to say that these adult perspectives rarely factor into their daily lives as much as they do the lives of adults, who are more personally served by such trivialities.
And even if they did factor in, it's not like children are on some moving platform where ideology is pumped into their open head at one end, stored for a while as they move along, and then emptied into the world when they drop off the other side without any permutation or elaboration by the child themselves in the interim. Lest we forget, it's quite the contrary. Young people are constantly challenging the ideologies they are exposed to. Would we as adults want it any other way? Should they not be exposed to a variety of ideas and given time to hash them out in their own heads? Are we more afraid of corrupting children or of letting them think for themselves?
In this case, the last thing we ought to be worrying about is exposing our children to a certain ideology in fear that they will inevitably follow that ideology without question straight to their dying bed (what an unrealistic expectation, but such is the adult). What we really ought to be afraid of is cheating them out of a good story by filling it up with self-righteous, shoe-horned, one-sided politics, ethics, or other ideological claptrap. Give them a good story and the morals will always flesh themselves out on their own. Children have the ability to reason. They're not going to become New Agers or homophobic simply because some animated character in a movie they saw when they were six espoused those views. If they are going to get that way, it'll be for other reasons entirely centered around their own will and the social rewards surrounding belief. And most likely, 20 years from now they'll be right along side you calling out the shallow ideology in children's media just as you do, as will their children 40 years from now. Nothing ever changes.
The only corruption that takes place is just how pervasive the protective paranoia over children becomes after the first 30 years of life.
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