There has been much public discourse in recent days about whether the National Library Board should have removed three books it deemed unsuitable for children.  

That many parents have said the decision on whether the books are suitable should be left to parents is a worthy statement, based on the assumption that all parents who send their young children to the library will be vetting every book their children would be reading.  

Would such an assumption be reasonable? It would probably be reasonable for the parents who have spoken up, but it would not be a reasonable assumption for the majority of parents in Singapore who could possibly be feeling that they are already doing the right thing simply by taking the trouble to take their children to the library once a week or every few days.  

So the public debate should principally be whether the National Library Board has the duty to exercise its judgment – because many parents assume they are actively doing it, and would hold them accountable for it – to ensure that books available in the library are age-appropriate, and the courage to admit and correct any wrong judgment they may have made, including withdrawing books they had cleared but on review feel they should not have cleared. 

All these arguments then lead to the question of how much children need to be shaped in their understanding and character, as opposed to being largely left to develop on their own.  

The Chinese have a saying that one can see the future simply by seeing how the child’s character is like at three years of age. And psychologists have said that by the time a child is four year old, much of his or her beliefs, attitudes and values are already formed for life: This is BEFORE the child turns up in school, which therefore places the responsibility squarely on parents to consciously and deliberately attend to their children’s development of character before they even get to kindergarten. 

We find the following in Plato’s “Republic”: 

“You know that the beginning is the most important part of any work, especially in the case of a young and tender thing; for that is the time at which the character is being formed and the desired impression is more readily taken. . . shall we just carelessly allow children to hear any casual tales which may be devised by casual persons, and to receive into their minds ideas for the most part the very opposite of those that we should wish them to have when they are grown up? 

“We cannot. . . . anything received into the mind at that age is likely to become indelible and unalterable; and therefore it is most important that the tales that the young first hear should be models of virtuous thoughts. . . . 

“Then will our youth dwell in a land of health, amid fair sights and sounds, and receive the good in everything; and beauty, the effluence of fair works, shall flow into the eye and ear, like a health-giving breeze from a purer region, and insensibly draw the soul from the earliest years into likeness and sympathy with the beauty of reason. 

“There can be no nobler training than that.” 

Or as the Bible states even more succinctly in its book of Proverbs: “Train a child in the way he should go, and when he is old, he will not turn from it.”