Children; Our Future

As Crain argues in her chapter "The Republic of ABC: Alphabetizing Americans," the way we're taught discipline, literacy, discourse, and structure shapes the way we think and how we perceive culture. One of Crain's example is a common word-association alphabet in the eighteenth century that associated things with the letters of the alphabet, and because noblemen, kings, beggars, soldiers, etc., were some of the things associated with letters, it instilled a sense of class and hierarchy in the children who were exposed to these media.
I'm going to use the same example- how the alphabet and certain word-letter associations would associate very different cultural meanings on our chlidren.

If we lived in a socialist community, where the community was the highest valued idea, the alphabet taught to children would look very different. A would stand for Alarm, the thing that makes every good worker get out of bed on time to go to work. B would stand for the Bricklayer, who makes all of our buildings, C would stand for Coal that keeps the great furnaces of the nation burning, so on and so forth.

As Crain argues, this works two ways. Children are acculturated by these learning devices, and then as they age and become part of the system they shape the culture. So a Marxist/Socialist style country that produces this media would possibly raise children with a predisposition towards those ideas, children who are permanently acculturated in a society where community is center of all government. These children would then go on to promote the society even more. It's not just the society imparting its ways onto its children, these children eventually grow into the society and shape it.

Likewise, in the society that would teach children through catechisms children would be far more predisposed towards faith, the bible, and Christianity. A might stand for Adam, B for Bible, C for Christ, D for Deuteronomy, E for Eve, F for forgiveness...

These cultural mnemonics mean significant things down the road. When an entire society of people was raised on "A for Adam," at some point in their lives they have to remember the letter A as the signifier for any reason, the signified "Adam" automatically comes to mind, which instantly generates the Bible, Christianity, and all of the implications of that in their mind. Likewise, a society that thinks "A for Alarm" would think of the signified "Alarm" every time they had to use the alphabet, and would thus be reminded of getting up to go to work like a good citizen. Having these cultural leanings in one's mind can affect the construction of someone's entire being within their culture, as is the basic premise of Crain's argument.