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.
