The entertainment wing of the Professional Right has been beating up MSNBC host Melissa Harris-Perry over one of her “Lean Forward” promos. The promo invited controversy, I guess, because Perry talked about a need for people to think about “our children” and support more funding for education. She said that we should think of children as belonging to the community, not just their parents or families. This obviously did not sit well with the home-schooler audience for Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh. Sarah Palin called it “unflippingbelievable.” It didn’t take long for people to make the connection to Hillary Clinton’s controversial book, It Takes a Village. And then, of course, to Hitler.
Collectivists throughout history have said that children do and should belong to the state and that if you control the children, you control the future.
One well-known collectivist echoed such sentiments when he said, “Let me control the textbooks and I will control the state. The state will take youth and give to youth its own education and its own upbringing. Your child belongs to us already… what are you?”
So said Adolf Hitler, who founded a sate-run youth group that bore his name.
If you don’t feel like quibbling about Hitler’s collectivist credentials, you should at least object to this deliberate misreading of Harris-Perry’s point. However awkwardly, she was arguing that we, as individuals, not as organs of the state, should look on other people’s children as partly our responsibility. We have a responsibility to support funding for their education. She didn’t mean that we will be driving them to soccer practice, brushing their teeth, or tucking them into bed at night.
The critique of the promo gets even dumber when we look at it as a matter of government overreach. The law says children need to be in school until they are sixteen. If they are not in school, then they have to be in a state-approved home-school situation. Obviously, the government could not mandate school for kids and then refuse to fund schools. That would by the real tyranny. So, why not fund them adequately?
And the answer to the adequate funding question is that people are so tax averse that it’s hard to raise the needed funds. The solution, therefore, is at least in part to change people’s attitudes and get them to see education funding as a collective responsibility or obligation.
It’s not that the children don’t belong to their parents or their families. It’s that they need our help to get a good public education.
But, yeah, go ahead and pound on the black lady professor. Call her a Nazi and a Communist. Your rebranding effort is going swimmingly.
It’s a slippery slope though, isn’t it? You start caring about other people’s children, the next thing you know you might get all blubbery when a maniac with an assault rifle kills a bunch of them. That could lead to a ban on high capacity clips. Next stop, the ovens.
Touche.
Communists throughout history have built public schools.
My worthy opponent has said he wants to build public schools.
No, I’m not saying he’s a communist.
But you have to wonder.
In California there’s plenty of money for schools in the budget. The problem is that we spend it on prisons instead. Maybe if we spent more of it on schools, we wouldn’t have to spend as much on prisons. (and also, shut down the crazy drug war).
Palin, Palin…. nope, doesn’t ring a bell.
The continuing effort by a militarist nationalist authoritarian movement to project their (left wing) opponents as “Hitlerites” is somewhat ironic. “The State! The State! Hitler Youth!” Jesus, what imbeciles.
A shame no American journalist (or network) is able or willing to defend themselves or call a spade a spade. Has the host apologized to the raving home schoolers yet?
Perhaps someday one of the two frontpagers can run a post about how all this new American “home schooling” is doing, education-wise. What’s the data? Are the kids college ready? I think I’d get sick of the “teacher” pretty quick. Mom as sole teacher from K-12? Jesus, I wouldn’t wish it on anyone. Not much in the way of extra curricular events either. Maybe going to the pet store is a field trip. And a prom is certainly out, haha.
Mom’s Homeroom would also seems to leave quite a lot to be desired on the socialization (not socialism!) front. Do these kids really succeed in becoming proficient in the 3Rs at Kitchen Table High? To have one’s young life (and education) so seriously railroaded by Mommy and Daddy’s (fairly lunatic) political ideology seems kinda unfortunate.
Oh well, according to the American Right, parents apparently “own” their kids, just like their dogs. Too bad “conservatives” can’t get past the “ownership” thing. Indeed, they have to project it onto the Left.
Interesting how the community apparently has some sort of “interest” in marriage, but not the education of children. How can any kid keep up with all the rules of “conservative” thought?
Harris-Perry to the RWNJs:“Allow me to double down”
Actually, a lot of the Christian homeschoolers have arrangements with each other (and, for extracurricular activities, local school districts) to help with socialization. The bigger problem is that those kids are very carefully kept from any exposure outside the bubble that thinks all non-white kids are icky and our ancestors rode dinosaurs.
You write:
Oh, bullshit!!! Sure there are some home schoolers that are antediluvian in their mindset., And there are more than likely others who are fundamentalist Muslims who think that European-ascended people are the spawn of Satan. So what? I just spent some time with a home-schooled country white kid…he’s about 16 now…who has already mastered almost the entire lexicon of mainstream jazz saxophone, regardless of the race of the players. How? Why? Because the information and technology is readily available online, that’s how and why. That and the fact that his “schooling” is taking place at the rate that he can absorb it and he is not being force-fed busywork to keep him out of trouble.
The public school system is broken. That’s the bottom line here.
Bet on it.
AG
I specified Christian homeschoolers, Arthur. The folks (usually evangelicals) who keep their kids out of public schools not because of the poor quality of public education, but because the curriculum is suffused with Satan’s handiwork. And – the subtext – because some of those public school kids have funny-colored skin. I come from the South, where that mindset utterly dominates homeschooling. I know some of those parents personally.
Homeschooling, for those who can do it, is great; while the Christian homeschool movement has made the option more accepted overall, it’s also tarred all homeschooling with the motivations and ignorance of the Christianists. I was very specific about a certain type of parent and family in my wording, and you know that.
Also, too, I’m sure some homeschooled Christian kids are or become talented musicians. So fucking what? Unless the sect involves frowns on music (which is rare unless we’re talking rock or hip-hop), music education isn’t what these parents are afraid of. That wasn’t what I was writing about, and you know that, too.
Your bitterness I don’t mind; it’s not a very effective rhetorical tool, but there’s a lot about our society we have a right to be bitter about if we like, and you have every right and reason. Just don’t distort my words to make your points, OK?
And I specified…below, admittedly:
You “specified Christian homeschoolers.” OK. Here is this burgeoning societal meme. “All homeschoolers are crazy.” I see it all over the media,
sometimes subtly and other times not so subtly.
And here you are, isolating some percentage of homeschoolers as Satan-fearing nutjobs. Racist Satan-fearing nutjobs at that.
What percentage is that, exactly?
Are your ready to tar the entire homeschooling movement with the broad brush of liberal anti-Christian fundamentalist dogma?
I’m not.
Prove it.
Give me some figures, not anecdotal so-called evidence like ” I come from the South, where that mindset utterly dominates homeschooling. I know some of those parents personally.”
Prove it.
I maintain that the public school system of the U.S.is in big trouble, and further that throwing more money at it ain’t gonna do shit to change the situation. Homeschoolers…from any part of the culture…are seeing exactly the same thing that I have seen over the past several decades. Are some of them Christian fundamentalists? Racists? I suppose so. But are they all that way? Does a decision to take your child out of a devolved system…for whatever reason…mean that you are some kind of racist fool?
I think not, myself.
AG
Talk about an incoherent knee-jerk attack. Gretchen Carlson and Tony Perkins wind up publicly agreeing with what the professor said but condemning what they say she said. Video here…http://nation.foxnews.com/msnbc/2013/04/10/family-research-council-s-tony-perkins-rips-harris-perry-
s-msnbc-promo-children-aren-t-born
meme that I have been hearing from the leftiness brigade lately?
I mean…a well-functioning public school system is certainly the best method to teach most kids what they will need to know in order to survive in any given culture. (Private schools and parochial schools ain’t necessarily so bad either. Again, the operative word here is “well-functioning.”)
But…what if the schools that are available are not so well-functioning? What then?
Let the kids rot in the lockstep hellholes that we now call “public schools” across the entire spectrum of wealth in this country? Man…I’ve been inside that system to some degree over the last couple of decades and my mother fought the good fight from inside it for 40+years, and let me tell you…wealthy, middle-class or poor those schools are simply not doing very well.
What is a parent to do about this?
Move to a better school district?
I actually tried that when my son was going into 2nd grade. I took a big hit financially from the move as well. It didn’t turn out so good, though. The “highly rated” district into which we moved was better in the lower grades, but by the time middle school rolled around it was clomp, clomp, clomping rote/mulitple choice test learning in every direction. We eventually found an “experimental” school that did a damned good job, but until we found it my son was in real trouble both academically and personally. We couldn’t home school him because we both had very strange work schedules or we would have tried it. We got lucky.
Where is this meme being promulgated?
On the so-called “liberal” media? Betcha. (I don’t consume that media…or more accurately, I am not consumed by it…so I don’t really know.) Is it just the usual leftiness kneejerk reaction to anything espoused by people who aren’t like them? Betcha that, too.
Home schooling is a viable answer to a rotted-out educational system. Why the kneejerks, ya jerks?
AG
It’s a reaction to home-schoolers as a lobbying group that opposes public investment.
But “if “public investment” over an appreciable period of time…I’ve been watching the increasingly rapid decline in the quality of public schooling for 40+ years…has not helped the situation, then how is opposition to the continuing system in any way “nuts?”
Oh.
They’re not functioning Democrats.
Sorry.
I should know better by now.
Clomp clomp clomp.
AG
Of course they’re going to go after her. She’s black. She’s a lady. And she’s a professor!! Ergo, Hitler reincarnated. If not Satan’s bride.
It’s always hard to pin an exact date on what era these reactionaries want to take us back to – before the New Deal? The Gilded Age? Antebellum? The colonial era? Salem witch trials? 12th Century? – but for sure for this group it’s before public education became compulsory. And many of them, judging from their actions, don’t believe in education at all.
They don’t know. That’s the beauty (or ugly) of their position.