“A Nobel Prize winner says public preschool programs should start at birth”. See here. It’s not precisely “Brave New World”, but it shares the social control, conditioning and removal of parents. It’s not “cradle to grave” but it’s a giant step toward it.
A social-educational-child-rearing bureaucracy has to accompany this measure. Since the U.S. Department of Education already has an Office of Elementary and Secondary Education, an Office of Postsecondary Education, an Office of Vocational and Adult Education, and an Office of Special Education and Rehabilitative Services, it need only add an Office of Preschool Education.
This is another step in the elimination of the family. The family disappears and goes the way of the dodo bird. Utilitarians and progressives rejoice. No child is left behind. Every child is “saved”. It takes a village becomes reality: It takes a society. Hillary Clinton triumphs after all. The shadow of socialism is proffered as the Light.
Speaking for the Hillary Clintons of this world, Republicans included, if you dolts and deplorables can’t raise your children to fit into Society, which is our God, whom only we the superior know and serve, then we will.
What can go wrong in such a scheme? What’s wrong with this proposal? What’s wrong with this picture? Is it not better that a child be raised by a professional child-rearer than by an incompetent parent? Don’t incompetent low-income parents lose the right to raise their offspring? If one were born behind the Rawlsian veil of ignorance, not knowing where one might end up, wouldn’t the baby prefer to be raised by a preschool outfit than to end up a misfit at the lower rungs of society?
What are the outer limits of this approach to lives? If the “social” is the “end” or the social determines the ends, what happens to a single person? Who decides what life is about and what its meaning is? In the removal of family and the replacement by replacement parents, what happens to the universe that each person is, that is, each person’s particular sphere of activity, interest, or experience, each person’s particular aspirations and spirit, each person’s particular wants and desires, each person’s planned and accidental movements, and each person’s directions and creativity? What happens to the variety of family cultures and the variety of parental knowledge? Who decides? Who establishes the education, the morality, the folk wisdom to be imparted and passed on? Who and what mold a child’s character? What happens to the development of individual talents within a system that handles all preschool children, a system that is tailored to mass production and control?
What happens to the child who differs? They all will indeed differ. What happens to child expression that doesn’t fit the new mold that’s set out by those in control? What sort of uniform person results from such an environment? What sort of happiness or unhappiness is produced by the attempted uniformity and “scientific” principles that pervade such a preschool environment?
Why isn’t such an attempt bound to be as much a failure as public schools already are? Can the remedy for these failures be more of the same, but from an earlier age? Can we not anticipate the administration of more drugs at an earlier age? Can we not anticipate misguided attempts to alter masculinity and femininity? Can we not anticipate attempts to impose fashionable fads of human behavior and philosophies of life?
How will prospective parents react to not being able to raise their own children? Why have them? Child birth is no picnic. Caring for a child is both gratifying and challenging. What happens to love and pride in one’s offspring when parents lose their children to others who mold them at the earliest of ages?
What can possibly be wrong with a study that purports to show how much “society” benefits by professional pre-school education for all low-income parents?
Why shouldn’t the luck of one’s parentage be removed as a factor that influences how one turns out as a person? So what if coercion is involved? It’s for the sake of the children, is it not? Parents are implicitly targeted as inept idiots and monsters who mistreat children and who cannot afford to pay for quality education and upbringing. So why shouldn’t they be removed from the picture? What’s so bad about uniformity of preschool education and removing factors that cause differences and inequalities?
Who owns a child? Who has rights over a child? Parents bring children into this world, and so they have rights to raise their children until the children’s own rights to run their own lives come to be asserted as the children grow up. This is an individual process. Where do “society’s” rights come from? How do they attain any legitimacy? They simply mean the assertion of control by persons other than the parents. How could control by others ever be justified as a general matter? There are circumstances when parents lose their rights by mistreating children. But can “society” or “other persons” of higher income claim that low-income parents systematically mistreat their children by denying them the care and educational specifics or the moral and character training that the higher-income people claim to be superior at? Who is to say that a Nobel Prize winner or a social scientist who has done a study knows better than a woman who picked cotton in the rural South or a woman who didn’t get beyond the 7th grade? Who decides on values? If a person as parent is prevented from deciding upon values implemented in raising children, what gives others that right? Who ultimately has the right to choose values? Does society demonstrate a better right than a prospective parent? How can this be, when the process of raising children is always in the future? Are future parents to be classified as incompetent parents from the get-go, the moment that the baby is delivered, by removing children forcibly to public preschools? What did parents do to deserve such a fate? What did “society” (other persons) do to deserve to become the “parents” newly in charge? Who has a right to raise a child and who does not? May I take away your child to a preschool because my income is 3 times your income, or your class of income-earners in general produces children who earn less money? Who has decided on the criteria that supposedly justify my right to remove your child from your control and place him or her under my control?
The proposal to have public preschool education from birth to kindergarten is astounding. It could not be more totalitarian, as it must enforce uniformity upon children and prescribed methods of child-rearing. It must suffocate personality and diversity in favor of attitudes and loyalties approved by the state’s education agents. It extends the training in subservience to the state to as early an age as possible, save molding children in the womb, and that’s a logical extension. This is a step in the direction of breeding and training human beings like animals. That comparison illustrates everything that’s wrong with such a horrible idea. Animals can’t think and plan and know, but human beings can. Thought control is the essence of destroying a human being’s individuality, and that is what’s involved in public preschool education..
7:47 am on December 12, 2016
