Archbishop of Canterbury's Christmas sermon at Canterbury Cathedral

The Archbishop of Canterbury - Archbishop of Canterbury's Christmas sermon at Canterbury Cathedral

And in the case of children, we shall do our level best to turn you into active little consumers and performers as soon as we can. We shall test you relentlessly in schools, we shall bombard you with advertising, often highly sexualised advertising, we shall worry you about your prospects and skills from the word go; we shall do all we can to make childhood a brief and rather regrettable stage on the way to the real thing - which is 'independence', turning you into a useful cog in the social machine that won't need too much maintenance.

The whole sermon is worth a read, not too long, but I especially liked this bit about how society treats children. The whole sermon is about an appropriate dependancy, on god and each other.