For more than 75 years, the boys have been boxed in. Since 1948, Goofus and Gallant, the stars of their eponymous comic strip in Highlights for Children magazine, have taught generations of kids the dos and don’ts of how to be. The premise is as simple as it is effective: two panels, side by side, depicting two approaches to the same situation. On the left, Goofus does the wrong thing. On the right, Gallant does the correct thing. If Goofus is rude, Gallant is polite. If Goofus lies, Gallant tells the truth.

The boys are prepubescent, but their exact age is unclear, as is their relationship to each other. Though the style of their illustration has changed over the years (they were briefly elves with pointed ears before transforming, unannounced, into human boys), they have always been essentially identical to each other. Are they twin brothers? Friends? The same kid in alternate universes? Or is it more of a Jekyll-and-Hyde situation?

It doesn’t really matter. Goofus and Gallant are symbols more than characters. In every issue, they play out a sort of Calvinist destiny. Their essential nature was preordained by a higher power long ago—Goofus forever doomed to be a screwup, Gallant to be a smug little do-gooder. What can they do but play the roles that were laid out for them?

The higher power that created them was Garry Cleveland Myers, who first wrote a version of the strip called “The G-Twins” at the magazine Children’s Activities, before he co-founded Highlights with his wife, Caroline Clark Myers. But in another sense the characters sprang directly from the moral compass of society. I recently spent a day at the Library of Congress, reading Goofus and Gallant strips from over the years, and found that the panels are remarkable windows into history. They chart the shifting freedoms and boundaries of childhood, and illustrate how adults’ expectations of kids have changed over the decades.

Highlights is explicitly edutainment. The magazine’s tagline is “Fun with a purpose,” and many issues over the years have included guides to its contents for teachers and parents. A flyer tucked into a 1948 issue at the Library of Congress explains to parents how the magazine can be used for the “home training of the child.” “Character building threads through the book from cover to cover,” it reads.

That philosophy remains, and is perhaps most obvious in Goofus and Gallant. “The feature is designed to be a part of our work to help kids become their best selves,” Christine French Cully, Highlights’ current editor in chief, told me. “It’s about helping kids develop character and moral intelligence.”

Many of the comic’s themes are timeless. Again and again, I saw Goofus pocket lost money while Gallant chased down the owner. Goofus left a mess while Gallant tidied up; Goofus bullied and excluded other kids while Gallant welcomed them. If you crack open a December issue from any era, you’ll probably find Goofus being a greedy little gremlin about his Christmas presents, while Gallant rhapsodizes about the pleasures of giving to others. The strip also has a few oddly specific preoccupations—not messing with other people’s mail, changing from good clothes into “play clothes,” putting your bike away instead of dumping it on the lawn, and not blocking the sidewalk all appear multiple times over the decades. The core of what it means to be considerate hasn’t changed dramatically from 1948 to today.

But a lot has changed. Technology is an obvious example, and the strip has guided kids through the etiquette of sharing the TV with your family and taking a polite phone message all the way through to being quiet during a parent’s Zoom meeting and not giving out personal information online. (Poor Goofus has fallen prey to a couple of scams over the years.) Gender roles, in the world and in the magazine, have also grown more expansive over time. The boys’ father seems more present in modern strips, after an unsurprisingly long time in which I only ever saw their mother doing domestic labor.