Other Views On Communal Children

John Hayward:

Let's do her [Melissa Harris Perry of MSNBC and Tulane] one more courtesy, and strip away the bubbleheaded liberal idiocy of claiming we don't spend enough on public education. We spend titanic amounts of money on it. The utter and complete failure of the public school teachers' unions is to blame, not insufficient spending. The sooner people like Melissa Harris-Perry admit this, the sooner we can get down to serious, effective educational reforms.

Behind her complaint about money lies a basic assertion that parents and family consider themselves disproportionately important to the educational growth of their children, when it should be seen as a collective responsibility, shouldered by government schools and community organizations. But that is the exact opposite of what public school bureaucrats invariably say when their failures are pointed out to them. They always claim that successful students have exceptionally strong support from involved parents. They take this to the level of implying that engaged parents who encourage good learning habits are tantamount to an unfair advantage. Public schools can't be expected to achieve educational success with kids who don't have that advantage.

If you've studied America's public education failure at all, or if you have kids in public school, you've probably heard this excuse a million times. And behind the excuse-making lies some research that demonstrates involved parents are indeed an asset for the education of their children.

So in addition to everything else offensive and foolish about that MSNBC promo, Melissa Harris-Perry is 100 percent wrong about the basic point she was trying to make. She has it exactly backwards. It takes a family to raise a child, not a village.”

Iowa Hawk:

One of the creepier features of lefty language is the application of possessive pronouns. "My" is for rights (real or imagined), "your" is for responsibilities, "our" is for the stuff in my bank account they want to take. Unless it's the case of "our responsibility" in which case they actually mean "your responsibility." As the old saying goes, "what's mine is mine, what's yours is negotiable."

Nowhere is this linguistic claim-jumping more bloodcurdling than when they apply it to actual human beings: "our workers," "our seniors," and especially "our children."
Oh, Melissa Harris-Perry? I have a rule. Unless you're my wife, there ain't no such thing as "our children."

There are many terms that are rendered suspect when Leftists use them. “Women’s healthcare” is one, as is “women’s reproductive Rights”. What those terms really mean to Leftists is killing the human which results from women’s copulation. "Tolerance", "equality" and "progress" also come to mind.

Melissa Harris-Perry makes it clear that she is unapologetic, yet she restates her position using different terms which are outside the usual Leftist collectivist, possession-focused lexicon:

“One thing is for sure: I have no intention of apologizing for saying that our children, all of our children, are part of more than our households, they are part of our communities and deserve to have the care, attention, resources, respect and opportunities of those communities.”

This is not what she said, of course, when she said that children do not belong to their parents:

” So part of it is that we have to break through our kind of private idea that kids belong to their parents, or that kids belong to their families, and recognize that kids belong to whole communities.”

She did not say “belong only to parents”; she did not say “belong only to families”; she did not say “belong to whole communities…as well as parents and families.

She is a teacher, one who either cannot see her linguistic error if it was one, or cannot admit to her ideology if she actually meant what she said when she said what she said. I’m of the opinion that she meant it: parental ownership is bad; even more money thrown at the failed system is good. We don’t get enough money – even though we get tons of it – because there is this idea that kids belong to their parents:

"We’ve never invested as much money in education as we should have, because we’ve always had a private notion of children."

She made it clear:

"Your kid is yours, and totally your responsibility."

Yes, your kid is really yours; you can move in order to avoid bad schools; you can evaluate teachers and demand a change; you can home-school. (They don't want you involved in your child's abortion, however).

Or perhaps you live in one of the perpetual ghettos which the government maintains for its voting captives: in that case, of course, your kid likely either belongs to a gang, or is working his way out of that world.

Even if Harris-Perry is given the linguistic benefit of the doubt, she is totally wrong: (a) the results of government education are not correlated with ever increasing cash consumption by the education system; (b) we already know that children are “part of” a larger community: so what? (c) it is not “everybody’s responsibility” outside of voting and taxes; education is up to parents and teachers, and teacher’s constraints and educational ideologies are the reason that the home-schooling movement is growing so rapidly. What Harris-Perry doesn’t mention is ideology in teaching and especially professors; I wonder why Professor Harris-Perry doesn’t address that?