Fortune favours the bold
Chapter 6 — how values are actually formed: the family, the wider society, and educational institutions.
The three institutions are usually described as reinforcing each other. In a real Indian childhood they frequently contradict each other — and what a person becomes depends largely on how that contradiction is resolved.
Schools teach values twice: once in the moral science period, which children forget, and once through how the institution actually behaves, which they remember for life.
A person’s values are not only what they were taught. They are also what the people around them get away with — and that is the part of ethics no family controls.
Every officer who refuses a bribe at forty was taught something at seven. This part is about how that teaching actually happens — and why the family is both the most powerful moral influence in a person’s life and the least reliable.