You have to wonder if any of the following conversations between a parent and a child ever took place.
“Joan of Arc, you put down that sword and get back in here. No daughter of mine is going to lead a French army!”
“Thomas Jefferson! I hope you haven’t been spending time with that awful Patrick Henry again! He’s a rebel, I tell you, a rebel!”
“Marie, ever since you and Pierre Curie have been married, you’ve just glowed! Unfortunately, all the plants nearby keep wilting.”
“Theodore Roosevelt! Stop charging up the stairs!”
“Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart! If you keep playing that music so loud, you’ll go deaf!”
“Edvard Munch! If you keep doing that, your face will freeze just like that!”
sfnowak 
Your thoughts continue to freak me out. I had to go back to the title and read that one all-important word: “COULD.” Shoot, your piece could have easily been titled “Children are not things to be molded but persons to be unfolded!”
Here’s something that DID happen. Three youths were expelled from their schools. One because he was always drawing pictures in geography class, the other because he was constantly fighting during recreation, and the third because he kept revolutionary literature under his mattress. No one today remembers the valedictorians or the bright kids of those classes. But there is no one in the world who does not know the first boy who was Hitler; the second, who was Mussolini; and the third, who was Stalin. How their parents and teachers must have wished they had been more observant, more guiding, and more involved.