First they told us that we didn’t build our businesses. Now we learn that our kids aren’t ours.
“We have never invested as much in public education as we should have,” TV talking head Melissa Harris-Perry argues in the latest MSNBC “Lean Forward” propaganda spot, “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 of 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. Once it’s everybody’s responsibility, and not just the household’s, then we start making better investments.”
Yeah, better investments. Like Solyndra. Or . . . the K-12 public education system for which, since 1970, the federal government has increased per-pupil spending by roughly 190 percent, only to flatline test scores in math, science and reading.
“When the flood of vitriolic responses to the ad began, my first reaction was relief,” Perry writes on her blog. “I had spent the entire day grading papers and was relieved that since these children were not my responsibility, I could simply mail the students’ papers to their moms and dads to grade!”
Doesn’t Tulane University pay her for grading those papers?
Claiming to “double down” in her defensive blog post, she actually admits that, “Of course, parents can and should raise their children with their own values.”
Of course.
What does Melissa Harris-Perry not get? That children belong, not to the state or the collective, and not really to their parents, but to themselves.
Is that much individual freedom leaning too far forward?
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.