Children as Property of the State

Leftists tend not to have many kids.  Without indoctrination disguised as education they have no political future.  From Not the Bee:

The State is your mother, children. Disregard the mother and father who gave you life, as well as God in heaven above, and listen to what the government wants you to believe!

Yes, this is a real opinion article that WaPo gleefully ran.

In their search for issues that will deliver Congress in 2022, conservatives have begun to circle around the cause of “parents’ rights.”

Yep, this is the first line of said article.

“Parents’ rights” is put in mocking scare quotes, because the authors don’t believe there is such a thing.

After lamenting the rise of angry parents who are tired of the indoctrination of their children, the authors write this:

Yet what’s actually radical here is the assertion of parental powers that have never previously existed. This is not to say that parents should have no influence over how their children are taught. But common law and case law in the United States have long supported the idea that education should prepare young people to think for themselves, even if that runs counter to the wishes of parents.

Go here to read the rest.  First, common law says virtually nothing about public education as state supplied education as we have now is a relative novelty historically speaking:

THE laft duty of parents to their children is that of giving them an education fuitable to their ftation in life : a duty pointed out by reafon, and of far the greateft importance of any. For, as Puffendorf very well obferves ^u, it is not eafy to imagine or allow, that a parent has conferred any confiderable benefit upon his child, by bringing him into the world ; if he afterwards entirely neglects his culture and education, and fuffers him to grow up like a mere beaft, to lead a life ufelefs to others, and fhameful to himfelf. Yet the municipal laws of moft countries feem to be defective in this point, by not conftraining the parent to beftow a proper education upon his children. Perhaps they thought it punifhment enough to leave the parent, who neglects the inftruction of his family, to labour under thofe grifs and inconveniences, which his family, fo uninftructed, will be fure to bring upon him. Our laws, though their defects in this particular cannot be denied, have in one inftance made a wife provifion for breeding up the rifing generation ; fince the poor and laborious part of the community, when paft the age of nurture, are taken out of the hands of their parents, by the ftatutes for apprenticing poor children ^w ; and are placed out by the public in fuch a manner, as may render their abilities, in their feveral ftations, of the greateft advantage to the commonwealth. The rich indeed are left at their own option, whether they will breed up their children to be ornaments or difgraces to their family.

Blackstone’s Commentaries, Book One, Chapter 16.

Second, case law at all levels have usually held that parents are the primary educators of their children which is why homeschooling is legal in every state.  Our system of local school boards and public meetings presupposes heavy parental involvement with local schools.

The idea that the indoctrination parents have been objecting to teaches kids to think for themselves, rather than simply to parrot what they have been taught ad nauseum at school, is risible.  If conservatives had the strangle hold on public education which the Left does, the Left would see just how risible such a contention is.  State institutions controlled by politicians with a unionized, and frequently very politicized, staff of teachers, and students mandated to be there, is the very last place where one might reasonably expect independent thought to grow, which is why parents should be alarmed when tax dollars are used to indoctrinate their kids, not the State’s kids, in values and beliefs the parents do not share.  People normally learn to think for themselves by a slow and gradual process through experiences at home, the vicissitudes of life, at work and through independent study and reflection.  The onset of adulthood, especially becoming parents, forces most of us to begin thinking for ourselves if nothing else will.  Schools traditionally have merely given students the tools of literacy and numeracy and other basic knowledge.  Only in the past few decades have schools, often failing in these essential tasks, embarked upon schemes of politicized indoctrination masked as “teaching kids what how to think.”