A Canadian court recently ruled that a father cannot prevent his 14 year old daughter from “transgendering.” Governments throughout the West are increasingly taking control of child rearing. An important part of the progressive agenda is to fundamentally transform society by indoctrinating children. They follow the Jesuit motto: "Give me a child until he is seven and I will give you the man.” 1960s radical Jerry Rubin claimed, “We are stealing the youth of America right out of the kindergartens and elementary schools.” Beat generation guru, Allen Ginsberg told Norman Podhoretz, “We’ll get you through your children!” Having captured the commanding heights of the education establishment, progressives are proclaiming that children are the property of the state.
The idea of children belonging to the state goes as far back as Plato’s Republic. In the ideal republic, “the children shall be common, and that no parent shall know its own offspring nor any child its parent.” “As the children are born, they’ll be taken over by the officials appointed for the purpose.” This idea was put into practice during the French Revolution. Bertrand Barere, a member of the revolutionary Committee on Public Safety) proclaimed, "The principles that ought to guide parents are that children belong to the general family, to the republic, before they belong to particular families. The spirit of private families must disappear when the great family calls. You are born for the republic and not for the pride or the despotism of families." His Fellow revolutionary, the Marquis de Sade, stated, “Do not think you can make good republicans so long as you isolate in their families the children who should belong to the republic alone.”
This was also the belief of the early Marxists. Friedrich Engels wrote in The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State, “With the passage of the means of production into common property, the individual family ceases to be the economic unit of society. The care and education of the children becomes a public matter.” This was the policy pursued by the early Bolsheviks. Zlata Lilina, the wife of Grigory Zinoviev, proclaimed, “We must rescue these children from the nefarious influence of family life. Our task now is to oblige the mother to give her children to us – to the Soviet state.” Another early Bolshevik functionary, M.N. Liadov asked, “Is it possible to bring up collective man in an individual family? Every conscientious father and mother must say: if we want our child to be liberated from that philistinism which is present in each of us, he must be isolated from ourselves... The sooner the child is taken from his mother and given over to a public nursery, the greater is the guarantee that he will be healthy. ”
This outlook has also been espoused in the West. Ellen Richards, an early social worker, claimed, "In the social republic, the child as a future citizen is an asset of the state, not the property of its parents. Hence its welfare is a direct concern of the state." Miriam Van Waters, another early social worker, stated, “As our case descriptions in clinics and conferences pile up, the wealth of evidence that the ‘normal’ home, as well as the broken home, fosters malnutrition, physical and spiritual, that sordid habit-settings and moral maladjustments occur in the ‘best’ families, and the conclusion grows, not that parents need education, but that a specialized agency had better take over the whole matter of child rearing.” Feminists have been particularly vocal on this subject. Simone de Beauvoir stated, "No woman should be authorized to stay at home and raise her children. Society should be totally different. Women should not have that choice, precisely because if there is such a choice, too many women will make that one." Kate Millet declared, “The care of the young is infinitely better left to trained professionals rather than to harried amateurs with little time nor taste for the education of young minds.” Clearly childrearing can not be left to amateurs.
Professor and former MSNBC host Melissa Harris-Perry asserted, “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.” Hillary Clinton paints a beautiful picture of government childcare in her book, It Takes a Village: “Imagine a country in which nearly all children between the ages of three and five attend preschool in sparkling classrooms, with teachers recruited and trained as child care professionals. When I went to France in 1989 . . . I saw what happens when a country makes caring for children a top priority. More than 90 percent of French children between ages three and five attend free or inexpensive preschools. Even before they reach the age of three, many of them are in full-day programs. French parents - even mothers who do not work outside the home - choose to send their children to these government-subsidized centers.” The reality, however, is far different than Hillary’s imaginings.
Anna Freud established a nursery during the Second World War. She selected her staff with the utmost care. Her nursery was designed to be an example of optimal care provided by professionals. Yet her results were disappointing. It would appear obvious that professional care would be superior to the “amateur” care provided by a mother. However, this has repeatedly proven to be untrue. Benjamin Spock did a great deal to promote “professional” childrearing. Yet he came to regret some of its consequences. He confessed, “It’s professional people- like me - who have gotten the parents afraid of their children’s hostility, and I don’t know if we can undo it. Pandora’s box has been opened.” In spite of substantial evidence that “professionals” provided by the state are less effective in raising children the trend is for more government intervention. In 1959 Spock attempted to replicate Freud’s finding with a $30,000 foundation grant. The results were also disappointing. Government administered childcare can range from disappointing to what can only be described as a horror story revealed by the BBC coverage of Romanian orphanages.
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