Obedience, diligence, and selflessness are admirable qualities. All kids and adults should strive to be really useful, in the best sense of the phrase. There's far too much narcissism in the world.
Consider that the US military simultaneously teaches the importance of following orders and every soldier/sailor/airman/marines obligation to refuse illegal orders.
And even there, people who run away from soviet union broke the law. It was ok to do so in my opinion. People who were dissenters, owned printers and spread ... ehm ... evil capitalist propaganda broke the law too. It was heroic from them to do so. Likewise with breaking nazi laws.
Likewise with marrying/dating between blacks and whites where it was illegal or helping slaves escape. I am ok with Snowden too.
If you think that the rule of law is about obedience, I think you are completely missing the point. The whole point of the rule of law is to avoid arbitrariness in how the state treats people. You could maybe say that it is about obedience of sorts on the part of those people who work for the government, to only use their special powers in line with what the law says. But even then you have the option to resign from the job rather than to obey if you object to what the law says.
While sometimes following rules while at the same time disagreeing with them is appropriate (and that also should be taught to kids), civil disobedience is also a very important factor in fighting injustice, in particular the kind of injustice that the state produces when it rules by unjust law.
Given how much injustice in the world has happened essentially because of obedience to laws, I find it hard to believe anyone would consider obedience a virtue. Laws in general should be followed, but not because it's a virtue to follow laws, but because enlightened self-interest should inform you that a society that has clear rules that everyone is bound by has tons of benefits, because by respecting the rules in favour of others, you gain that others respect the rules in your favour. But whenever that balance is clearly violated, it should be everyone's first priority to disobey.
(And the military itself knows this; scroll further down on the same page to read about "Command intent"—which is sort of, 1. the planned incentivization that commanders and law-makers do, giving orders that will be misinterpreted and misapplied by people with conflicting preferences to give results they ultimately want, rather than giving orders that are "right" at first but which go wrong after a fifteen-layer game of hierarchical telephone; and 2. the knowledge that the orders you've been given are of this "robust under misinterpretation" type, and so knowing to not read too much about the original "Commander's intent" into them.)
Teaching a child that following orders is good, but that disobeying "bad" orders is also good, is virtue ethics, and has all the same problems as virtue ethics: there's no clear test for which virtue wins when two virtues come into conflict.
Common intent sets a much clearer standard: just understand the intent of the person giving the order—the "spirit of the law"—and then obey that, disobeying the letter of the law if-and-only-if it conflicts with the spirit of the law. This shakes out to obedience to good orders (or orders given by trusted commanders) but disobedience to bad orders (or orders given by untrusted commanders) ...except where a good law/trusted commander applies a meta-order to the effect of "please do me the favor of following the bad orders; it advances the spirit of the law in a hard-to-follow consequentialist way that you'll be able to see in retrospect."
Which is pretty much what humans who we consider to have "character" already do intuitively, so it's (hopefully) a good thing to systematize.
That's fine, but in Thomas it's presented as : be really useful or else...
I find it mildly sinister, I have a visceral dislike for the show. The moralising does not sit well with me at all.
But to what? These qualities mean nothing in themselves. They are traits, not virtues. A virtue is surely a trait aligned to some kind of positive value.
You can obediently, diligently and selflessly slaughter people all day.
Children, developmentally challenged ones excluded, inherently trust parents who have given them adequate nurturing. Emotional outbursts, challenges to authority, and disrespectful behavior will happen as they become able to move around. The parent should be patient with, but not reward, uncontrollable emotional outbursts.
Challenges to authority or dangerous activities (e.g., running into traffic) should be met with firm, kind correction (move the child away from danger, say "no" to hitting and hold the hands, etc.). To influence children to perform an action, leverage and bargaining is effective.
It is through this slow, persistent grinding of wills that teach children how to behave. Meanwhile, allowing as much autonomy from the child as is possible / practical allows the child to blossom, while reading and sharing in activities inspires the child and builds trust and affection.
I firmly believe that obedience is earned in some way or another: through fear of retribution, or through the trust and desire to please / aversion to disappoint.
It is apparent later in life which children were raised in the latter manner: they, in general, have good relationships with their parents; authoritarian parents have a harder time developing relationships and getting much-needed support from their adult children.
I didn't mention neglectful parenting, which will often produce worse outcomes than authoritarian parenting: crime, emotional instability, etc.
Nobility, top hats, steam engines.
Valuing people for their utility is incredibly dangerous, because it logically invites us to devalue people for their lack of utility. My community is full of broad-shouldered, hard-working men who became economically useless when the coal mine closed. They're not worse than me, they were just born a few decades too late. They deserve every comfort that society affords me, but the fallacy of meritocracy has provided society with a plausible excuse to neglect them.
My understanding of technology bridges many islands - I know I'd be useful in the 19th or even 18th century because of my other characteristics.
You could be really useful to a really shitty employer and yet be a net negative on society.
My kids are a bit too old for Thomas now, but we still say people are "causing confusion and delay" when they derail the rest of the family.
When they watch a train crash episode, for example, they don't run into walls afterward, they pick up their trains and crash them together.
Oh, mine do both.
Crash into the couch.
"Bust my buffers!"
It's not too unusual to hear a young boy talking about Thomas while waiting for or in a train. It's often been the only real conversation I can understand elsewhere in Europe. ("Which one is this?" "It's red mummy, this is James!")
really? I always found it to be quite creepy. The constant obsession with being a "really useful" engine. The shaming of engines who don't toe the line. Victimisation of engines who misbehave. The show makes me strangely uncomfortable for some reason.