Walker wrote: ↑Mon Apr 15, 2024 2:34 pm
Seen through the lens of politics, the issue of what books should be in government-school libraries is the matter of Federalism vs. Centralized Power.
It doesn't have to be. It can be seen as a simple matter of parental responsibility, or of community standards expressed as the willingness of parents to approve or sanction particular materials.
Here's where we depart from the Socialists. The Socialists have a slogan:
"The personal is the political." It's complete nonsense, at total attempt at a power-grab, where people's personal business is linguistically reconstrued as somebody else's business. It's an absurd slogan that should never be accepted without challenge. It's always quoted manipulatively, handed out as if it were some kind of unquestionable truism. It's not.
Parents are the ones who create the child: it's their union that makes the very existence of that child possible. Immediately, nobody -- not even the father -- is as rightly-positioned to care for the child as the mother is. The father's important too, but in other ways and often somewhat later than the mother is. But the mother is highly dependent on her husband, because in the wake of birth she's physically depleted and totally rightly preoccupied with keeping a young human being alive. Likewise, the raising of the child is on them both: the burden of work, finances, discipline, instruction, safety, feeding, and so on are totally theirs.
When does the State become important at all? When does the political matter? Only when the child is of an age to become a political entity, which in a democracy, is when he/she can vote. Until then, the State's role is restricted to not interfering with whatever the parents need to do their job of raising the children they created. And a public schooling system is entirely optional, and at the choice of the parents. Teachers have absolutely no legitimate right to usurp the authority of parents in raising their children. Law inforcement might intervene in explicitly abusive or neglectful situations, of course; but teachers are no more than paid child-caretakers, whose only authority is derived from the agreement of the parents -- not the authority of the State.
So why is child care a "political" issue? Only if we've agreed to make it one, and then, only derivatively, by the consent of the parents of the child. A parent can home school a child if they are willing to do so, or form a community child-care plan; they do not owe the State the surrender of their children, and the State has no legitimate claim to taking over from the parents, unless the parental behavior in question is actually criminal -- and I don't mean by just any "criminality" definition the Left can generate: I mean things that stand to severely deprive, seriously injure or kill the child.
