Today, Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck discussed the MSNBC promo featuring one of their hosts, Melissa Harris-Perry, who nonchalantly asserts that we should adopt the “notion” that children “belong to whole communities.” Both Limbaugh and Beck appeared close to having strokes. Justifiably so.
In the Glenn Beck video, she says:
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 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.
“….never invested as much in pubic education as we should have….” The United States spends an enormous amount on public education.
This philosophy of political-educational is not new: Plato espoused such totalitarianism, so did Danton during the French Revolution. FRC has a great essay on statists and education. See the FRC pamphlet, “Who Should Decide How Children Are Educated” by Jack Klenk for an exploration of how such ideas conflict with American principles of freedom, rights, and constitutional law (see esp. sections 4 and 5). (Here is the executive summary.)
