The Magisterium doesn't want docile children.
It wants children who can't recognize what they actually want — because the daemon is the problem, and the daemon is the oracle, the part of yourself you can't lie to, can't rationalize away, can't perform around.
When Lyra watches Intercision happen, the horror isn't the psychological damage. It's that the severed child becomes compliant not through trauma but through metaphysical amputation — and the child no longer has access to the apparatus of self-knowledge.
This is why the procedure works so efficiently. You can't rebel against an order you can't feel resistance to. The Magisterium's genius is recognizing that authority isn't threatened by bad emotions—anger, lust, ambition—which can be channeled or punished.
Intercision at the right age means the child grows up with a phantom limb they never knew they had, obeying not from fear but from the metabolic inability to know what fear would even mean. The real parental anxiety this work externalizes isn't about protecting children from their feelings — it's the terror that your child might actually know what they want and it might be something you can't control.
Find the scene in Season 2 where Mrs. Coulter performs Intercision and notice that the child afterward isn't traumatized—they're empty in a specific way, speaking like someone reciting something they were told to feel. Compare it to any scene where Lyra's defiance comes from her disdain for what the adults want.
Philip Pullman's 2019 BBC Radio 4 interview where he explicitly discusses the Magisterium as a response to institutional denial of the body's right to self-knowledge—not repression, but the active erasure of the capacity to feel what rejection looks like.