This one has created quite an uproar over the last few days. But Melissa Harris-Perry's views are fairly common in leftists circles, especially in academia, where Ms. Perry can be found when she's not broadcasting to MSNBC's miniscule audience. Her Communitarian and collectivist notions of child rearing can be heard almost daily on college campuses throughout the country.
Normally, the left isn't this publicly candid, since even they - mostly - know how toxic an unvarnished expression of their true intentions can be to most Americans. That's why MSNBC can be so useful and instructive. At minimum, dozens of people were involved in the production and airing of this promo, so the network clearly felt it reflected the views of its audience, and themselves:
“We have never invested as much in public education as we should have because we’ve always had kind of a private notion of children – ‘Your kid is yours, and totally your responsibility.’ We haven’t had a very collective notion that these are our children. So part of it is we have to break through our kind of private idea that kids belong to their parents, or kids belong to their families, and recognize that kids belong to whole communities.”
The United States spends more per student on education than any industrialized country in the world, and receives mediocre results at best. But that's not quite what Ms Perry is talking about. She wants the community (State) and its values do be the dominant influence in children's lives. Skyrocketing out of wedlock births, especially prevalent among younger and less educated women, have provided the left with a growing number of children for whom the government becomes the second parent, and the school as the place that provides the very food they eat. Many of these kids will never learn much of anything useful and will be far more likely to have negative outcomes as adults, but they will be sufficiently indoctrinated with a statist value system. If you belong to the community as a child, then you will belong to it as an adult.
The problem for Ms. Perry is that too many families are the biggest influence their kids lives, and they teach them subversive values and beliefs like liberty, individualism and self reliance. They may even tell their kids - as I did with my two college graduate sons - to not believe everything their teachers told them, and to be critically thinking individuals above all else. This is why the left continuously attacks home-schooling, with some making a constitutional argument for outright bans. The left's opposition to vouchers and charter schools is not just about the greed of the NEA. It's about future generations universally believing their self worth is calculated based on their value or cost to the collective.
Like many parents, I view the raising of children as a long process of gradually letting go. That we teach, and then give them increasing levels of independence and responsibility, until they are ready to make their own way in the world.
The authoritarians view your children not as an end in themselves, with the right to live life for its own sake, but as a means to their ends.
