Tag: children

Categories
education and schooling folly nannyism

Well-Substantiated Insanity

Well-Substantiated Insanity
In what sort of place are children taken from their parents, or parents investigated by the authorities with that in mind, because they allowed their 10- and 6-year-olds to walk to a park to play?

Not a forced 20-mile march across Death Valley, mind you, but a Saturday stroll of less than a mile under normal earth conditions.

What sort of place? These United States — Silver Spring, Maryland, to be specific.

That’s where Danielle and Alexander Meitiv’s two kids, Rafi and Dvora, were picked up by police, on their way home from a neighborhood park.

A two-month Montgomery County Child Protective Services (MCCPS) investigation followed. Now, there’s no law against youngsters walking in public by themselves. Local public schools don’t provide bus service for kids within a mile of the school, deeming that close enough to walk. Nevertheless, this week, authorities announced that the Meitivs were “found responsible” for “unsubstantiated child neglect.”

The good news is that the neglect charge is completely “unsubstantiated.” The bad news is that official “Free State” busybodies seem to have not one clue as to what that word means.

MCCPS will keep a file on the suspicious family for five years. “We don’t know if we will get caught in this Kafkaesque loop again,” says Mrs. Meitiv, noting that the agency left unanswered the question of what might happen if they ever again dare allow their kids to walk outside the house without adult supervision.

The family is appealing the nonsensical MCCPS “finding.” In the meantime, the Meitiv children will continue to walk in public as if it’s a free country.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Categories
crime and punishment

When the State Spanks Parents

Be a parent, go to jail?

Should it be normal for parents to get arrested for making normal parental decisions — just because someone else believes it’s a mistake?

I’m not talking about demonstrable child abuse. I’m talking about the kind of decisions Radley Balko cites in a column on “the criminalization of parenthood.”

In one case, a South Carolina working mom was jailed for “unlawful conduct toward a child” — for letting her nine-year-old play in a well-attended park while she worked at McDonald’s. Social services took the child.

In another case, an Ohio father faces six months in jail because, unbeknownst to him, his eight-year-old son skipped church to play with friends in the neighborhood.

In a third, an Illinois woman was arrested for leaving a stubborn eight-year-old in her car for a few minutes while she dashed into a store.

We may disagree with what the parents did here (to the extent they could have done anything different). But arrest? Jail?

For six months?

One minute?

In the world that these incidents prefigure, the only way for parents to be “safe” in using our judgment will be to stop using it.

This would be life under the tyranny of “experts” and busybodies: to always project what the most skittish and punitive “authority” would require — and to do that instead of what we ourselves consider appropriate given all relevant, sometimes difficult circumstances.

Final question: What lesson does this brave new regime teach the children?

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
education and schooling ideological culture

It Takes a Collectivist

First they told us that we didn’t build our businesses. Now we learn that our kids aren’t ours.

“We have never invested as much in public education as we should have,” TV talking head Melissa Harris-Perry argues in the latest MSNBC “Lean Forward” propaganda spot, “because we’ve always had kind of a private notion of children: Your kid is yours and totally your responsibility. 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.”

Yeah, better investments. Like Solyndra. Or . . . the K-12 public education system for which, since 1970, the federal government has increased per-pupil spending by roughly 190 percent, only to flatline test scores in math, science and reading.

“When the flood of vitriolic responses to the ad began, my first reaction was relief,” Perry writes on her blog. “I had spent the entire day grading papers and was relieved that since these children were not my responsibility, I could simply mail the students’ papers to their moms and dads to grade!”

Doesn’t Tulane University pay her for grading those papers?

Claiming to “double down” in her defensive blog post, she actually admits that, “Of course, parents can and should raise their children with their own values.”

Of course.

What does Melissa Harris-Perry not get? That children belong, not to the state or the collective, and not really to their parents, but to themselves.

Is that much individual freedom leaning too far forward?

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
Second Amendment rights

Let Teachers Bear Arms

We have no sure way to prevent such horrors as the recent shooting at a Connecticut elementary school. We can’t predict which very few of the very many persons with grievances will choose to vent their rage by loosing a hail of bullets at innocents. And schools would be unable to function if they were so locked down as to eliminate the possibility of a gunman walking through the door.

We can, however, take measures to reduce the likelihood and severity of such an attack. We can also prepare to defend ourselves if the worst happens. When someone is shooting at you and the students in your care, the best chance of stopping the shooter within seconds — when the police are minutes away, at best — is to shoot back. The more persons able to shoot back, the better.

It makes sense for appropriately trained teachers and other school personnel to be armed and ready to confront an assailant. This isn’t just a theoretical proposal. In 2008, the Harrold school district in Northwest Texas introduced a “guardian plan” under which some teachers and other staffers carry concealed handguns. A few other school districts have followed suit. But the practice is far from common in Texas or in the nation at large.

Says Harrold’s superintendent, “Nothing is 100 percent. But what we do know is that we’ve done all we can to protect our children.”

The Harrold district’s provisions for self-defense are controversial. They shouldn’t be.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.