The Intellectual Deficit of the Modern Soviets

"We have never invested in public education as we should have, because we've always had kinda of a private notion of children: Your kid is yours, and totally your responsibity. 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."

MSNBC's Melissa Harris-Perry

My how the rhetoric of modern Liberals/Progressives resonates with that of the Soviets. It's simply not everyone's responsibility. It's the responsibility of the parents. One merely has to look at the state of bureaucracy in our community, and see that this agenda would produce the absolute worst outcome. Harris-Perry's naive and ignorant soundbite doesn't even allude to what this shared responsibility would entail. But I think it would sound something like this:

We must remove the children from the crude influence of their families. We must take them over and, to speak frankly, nationalize them.

Instructions given at a congress of Soviet educators in 1918 (cited in Separating School & State: How to Liberate America’s Families, by Sheldon Richman, pg. xv).

[The Soviet family] is an organic part of Soviet society. Parents are not without authority … but this authority is only a reflection of social authority…. In our country he alone is a man of worth whose needs and desires are the needs and desires of a collectivist…. Our family offers rich soil for the cultivation of such collectivism.

Soviet family theorist Anton S. Makarenko, The Collective Family, A Handbook for Russian Parents, pgs xi-xii, 42.

And finally:

If we want to talk about equality of opportunity for children, then the fact that children are raised in families means there’s no equality…. In order to raise children with equality, we must take them away from families and communally raise them.

Dr. Mary Jo Bane, Assistant Secretary of Administration for Children and Families at the US Department of Health and Human Services, 1993-1996; currently Thornton Bradshaw Professor of Public Police and Management, Harvard Kennedy School; quoted in “The Family: It’s Surviving and Healthy” by Dolores Barclay, Tulsa World, August 21, 1977.