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The excerpt represents the core issue or deciding factor on which you must meditate, and is drawn from A Treatise on Parents and Children by George Bernard Shaw: who has not stolen your watch because he did not know you had one.
Virtue chooses good from evil; and without knowledge there can be no
choice. And even this is a dangerous simplification of what actually
occurs. We are not choosing: we are growing. Were you to cut all of
what you call the evil out of a child, it would drop dead. If you try
to stretch it to full human stature when it is ten years old, you will
simply pull it into two pieces and be hanged. And when you try to do
this morally, which is what parents and schoolmasters are doing every
day, you ought to be hanged; and some day, when we take a sensible
view of the matter, you will be; and serve you right. The child does
not stand between a good and a bad angel: what it has to deal with is
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