All your kids are belong to us

The TV cable-news network MSNBC runs sermonettes from its anchors during commercial breaks. They are like public-service announcements illuminating the progressive mind, and perhaps none has ever been as revealing and The TV cable-news network MSNBC runs sermonettes from its anchors during commercial breaks. They are like public-service announcements illuminating the progressive mind, and perhaps none has ever been as revealing and remarkable as the one cut by weekend host Melissa Harris-Perry.

Harris-Perry set out to explain what is, by her lights, the failure to invest adequately in public education. She located the source of the problem in the insidious idea of parental responsibility for children.

“We’ve always had kind of a private notion of children,” she said, in the tone of an anthropologist explaining a strange practice she discovered when out doing far-flung fieldwork. “Your kid is yours and totally your responsibility.” So long as this retrograde conception prevails, according to Harris-Perry, we will never spend enough money on children. “We have to break through,” she urged, “our kind of private idea that kids belong to their parents or kids belong to their families.”

Oliver Wendell Holmes once wondered, “Why can’t somebody give us a list of things that everybody thinks and nobody says, and another list of things that everybody says and nobody thinks?” Harris-Perry’s contribution falls into the former category, at least within her orbit of left-wing academia (she teaches at Tulane University, after stops at Princeton and the University of Chicago) and journalism (she writes a column for The Nation as well as holding forth on MSNBC).

Her statement wasn’t an aside on live television. She didn’t misspeak. The spot was shot, produced, and aired without, apparently, raising any alarm bells. No one with influence raised his or her hand and said, “Should we really broadcast something that sounds so outlandish?”

The foundation of the Harris-Perry view is that society is a large-scale kibbutz. The title of Hillary Clinton’s bestseller in the 1990s expressed the same point in comforting folk wisdom: “It Takes a Village.”

As the ultimate private institution, the family is a stubborn obstacle to the great collective effort. Insofar as people invest in their own families, they are holding out on the state and unacceptably privileging their own kids over the children of others. These parents are selfish, small-minded, and backward. “Once it’s everybody’s responsibility,” Harris-Perry said of child-rearing, “and not just the households, then we start making better investments.”

This impulse toward the state as über-parent is based on a profound fallacy and a profound truth. The fallacy is that anyone can care about someone else’s children as much as his own. The former Texas Republican senator Phil Gramm liked to illustrate the hollowness of professions to the contrary with a story. He told a woman, “My educational policies are based on the fact that I care more about my children than you do.” She said, “No, you don’t.” Gramm replied, “Okay: What are their names?”

The truth is that parents are one of society’s most incorrigible sources of inequality. If you have two of them who stay married and are invested in your upbringing, you have hit life’s lottery. You will reap untold benefits denied to children who aren’t so lucky. That the family is so essential to the well-being of children has to be a constant source of frustration to the egalitarian statist, a reminder of the limits of his power.

The socialist president of France, François Hollande, proposed a small corrective to its influence last year. He inveighed against homework for schoolchildren. Work, he said, “must be done in the [school] facility rather than in the home if we want to support the children and reestablish equality.” His education minister explained that the state should “support all students in their personal work, rather than abandon them to their private resources, including financial, as is too often the case today.”

The proposal went nowhere. If the Left wants to equalize the investments in children that matter most, it should promote intact families and engaged parents, even if it means embracing shockingly old-fashioned private child-rearing.

— Rich Lowry: Editor of National Review

While it may not have been terribly well articulated, I think the point was to say 'children are not raised in a void, that everyone that interacts with a child has an impact of the outcome of the child, and that the outcome of that child in turn impacts all of us (ie we all benefit or suffer based on how the kid turns out), thus we all have a stake in the education of children.' This entire essay is a small sighted, partisan slight that intentionally misses the point of Ms. (Dr?) Harris-Perry. This is fear mongering (the liberals are coming for your kids!), nothing more.

Yeah, sure, that may seem the point to someone sympathetic to the left, because for it to be true, is too unacceptable. Yet not only has this view been expressed by liberals in the past, but lets face it, it also ties in with the cradle to grave mentality of big governmet supporters. Personally, im sick to death with all this equality bs. Im sry that not everyone is raised in the exqct same environment, born to parents who all care the same and make the same amount, doing government approved parental activities, but shit, thats never going to happen. Same principle behind the push for more gun control. Every time some psycho commits a murder, its not their fault, cuz after all theyre just a product of society. Therefore any time anyone does something wrong, its societys fault. Bullshit. This is just a way of excusing bad parents, because no one should be held accountable anymore, cuz after all, were all in this together now. This line of thinking is whats wrong with the world today. Its being propagated on our youth and spreading. Funny how all the anti-establishment radicals from the 60's now ARE the establishment, fighting on the other side.

Ill take liberty over equality any day of the week

Pun wrote: Yeah, sure, that may seem the point to someone sympathetic to the left, because for it to be true, is too unacceptable. Yet not only has this view been expressed by liberals in the past, but lets face it, it also ties in with the cradle to grave mentality of big governmet supporters. Personally, im sick to death with all this equality bs. Im sry that not everyone is raised in the exqct same environment, born to parents who all care the same and make the same amount, doing government approved parental activities, but shit, thats never going to happen. Same principle behind the push for more gun control. Every time some psycho commits a murder, its not their fault, cuz after all theyre just a product of society. Therefore any time anyone does something wrong, its societys fault. Bullshit. This is just a way of excusing bad parents, because no one should be held accountable anymore, cuz after all, were all in this together now. This line of thinking is whats wrong with the world today. Its being propagated on our youth and spreading. Funny how all the anti-establishment radicals from the 60's now ARE the establishment, fighting on the other side.

That is not what is being proposed and you know it. Good schools and locally ran afterschool programs are a far cry from what you suggest.

I never addressed the issue of public education, but rather the comments of this anchorlady and those with similar philosophies. Just out of curiosity bryant, how much research have you done on the views, tactics, and philosophy of the left? And i dont justean marx, but the radicals from the sixties in this country who now mingle in the elite circles of the left? Do you know what it really is the left wants? And i dont mean the eutopian talking points either. Just curious if you knew what it was you often stand behind. I know a lot about the history of the left and honestly, its some disturbed twisted ppl who have shaped its doctrine.

These kids were raised by "The Village" too....

Dennis324 wrote:These kids were raised by "The Village" too....

Godwin's Law. Pun wins.

:-P

Hehe

But youre right bryant. And how did that turn out? Many will say the nazis were of the right, and maybe so, but not the same way americans define peft and right = big all powerful government vs. limited government

But what the nazis did is very similar. The state became more of a parenting figure than individual parents. In fact there were even state run boarding houses for all the pregnant wives of getman troops and even encouraged having more aryan kids, even out of wedlock

Along with the indoctrination of course

Pun wrote:But what the nazis did is very similar. The state became more of a parenting figure than individual parents. In fact there were even state run boarding houses for all the pregnant wives of getman troops and even encouraged having more aryan kids, even out of wedlock

Absolutely...and that's what I was thinking when I looked up that video. I'm reminded of a documentary wherea girl in the BDM sent a letter to her mom talking about how many of her friends got pregnant at their camp...and that she was pregnant too! (By the boys at the nearby camp). Also how when one mom showed up at the camp to voice her outrage, the girl told her to go home or she'd report her mom to the authorities. The mom left. These girls were under 18 btw. I cant remember the name of the documentary but they show it from time to time on the military channel or the History channel.

The parents lost their rights and authority over their children when the state took over in Nazi Germany. Are we seeing the beginnings of something similar when condoms can be handed out to kids in American schools without their parents being notified? Or where school counselors can tell kids to have abortions without parental notification?

This is the sort of thing that concerns me when I hear ideas like "It takes a village". Furthermore, if the village raises my kids...are they going to send em to college too (regardless of how much money I make)? Are they gonna pay for their braces, or is that something the parent is gonna have to do?