Marathe and Steeply: the soup and the free choice (pp. 428–429)

Steeply gives the American answer to Marathe's "who teaches your children to choose," and the answer is the problem. The U.S. system, he says proudly, refuses to teach what to desire — it teaches only how to be free, how to make "knowledgeable choices about pleasure and delay." It's the candy-kid parable turned into pedagogy: you can't shock the child out of eating sweets, he has to learn balance "by his own experience." The whole exchange is the two doctrines meeting head-on — Marathe's temple you must be taught to choose against Steeply's freedom you must be left to discover. And the scene has already loaded the dice: a system that declines on principle to teach what's worth wanting, that leaves each child to learn pleasure-management alone, produces precisely the population Marathe describes, the one that will choose the fatal candy because no one ever gave it a reason not to.