Tabula Rasa

I was looking through my notes and working on my mythic detective presentation when I came across the phrase "tabula rasa".  I looked up information on this and the first Wikipedia definition says, Tabula rasa, meaning blank slate in Latin, is the epistemological theory that individuals are born without built in mental content and that their knowledge comes from experience and perception.  I can see both sides of this argument and am sort of torn between what I think I believe personally.  The idea that we are all born with a clean slate is comforting because it allows us to have so many possibilities, to learn endlessly, to be whoever we want to be.  This can also be scary because we are placed in the hands of two or sometimes one person as our guide and to start shaping what we will know and who we will be.  At the same time how can we be born with absolutely no knowledge at all.  That seems like such a hard thing to comprehend.  How can we learn anything if we didn't already know how to do the simple act of learning itself?  We are made up of many parts and those parts know how to function to make us exist, therefore, don't we already know something? Like how to live?  This is a topic I feel I could debate endlessly.