MSNBC host claims we have to break through the idea that kids belong to their parents
Here is what MSNBC host Melissa Harris-Perry had to say about the relationship between parents and their children:
We have never invested as much in public education as we should have 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
We parents have to get over the notion that our children belong to us and we have to get over the notion that we are responsible for the upbringing of our children because someday they will be a part of the community.
Why is it that people on left do not think we can raise our children to be a functioning member of the community without the government stepping in and taking responsibility from us?
Of course we know the answer to that question, don’t we? The leftists want to make sure they have complete control over what our children are taught from the time they first enter school until they graduate from college so they can be indoctrinated into the statist mindset, and in their opinion a parent with too much influence over their child is a hindrance to their goal. So basically what she is saying is that we parents also have to be reeducated because we are letting our children down by trying to instill values in them ourselves.
But if this quote sounds a little familiar it should, here is a quote from 1933: “When an opponent declares, “I will not come over to your side,” I calmly say, “Your child belongs to us already… What are you? You will pass on. Your descendants, however, now stand in the new camp. In a short time they will know nothing else but this new community.
The author of that quote? Adolph Hitler.
America's Watchtower 
Eh? Hitler was saying that the youth of his time were with him. It had nothing at all to do with his philosophy. Every leader – benign or malicious, seeks to recruit today’s children to his side. Hitler’s approach was highly visible and thus somewhat demoralizing to the west, but our establishment does the exact same thing, from public school to the Scouts.And it predates our time – a very famous fellow once said “Suffer the little children to come unto me.”
Hitler also was apparently an avid advocate of breathing. Shall we thus suffocate ourselves?
As to the topic of your post, I take the quote by Harris-Perry to mean that as a society, we have an obligation to all the children, not just to our own.
This was an endearing quality of President George W. Bush, whom I understand you folks have already flung beneath the bus. When he was nothing more than a lowly Governor of Texas running for the GOP nomination for the Presidency, he was talking to a crowd in one of the border states. One of the audience members was giving him a run for his money about the cost of illegal immigrants, particularly the burden apparently imposed by their children, in terms of education, nutrition, and health care. After a few moments of this negative kind of back-and-forth, Mr. Bush looked the fellow right in the eye and said “I don’t understand. I thought we’re supposed to love all the children.”
Ayn Rand may very well have advocated taking care of only one’s own children and to hell with the rest, but the evidence points to her being a sociopath. Like Hitler. For my part, I realize that these kids will one day be the police officers, firefighters, and nursing home attendants to whom we look for protection and support. I’d hate to think what sort of society we’ll become if we teach these children to make sure they’ve got theirs, and to hell with everyone else.
Take good care, and may God bless us all!
TGY
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If the youth were with Hitler it had everything to do with his philosophy because that was taught to them in the schools. So what you are saying is at least Hitler was honest, which is more than we can say for the Democrats.
I find it absurd to think that parents cannot be trusted to teach their children to be functioning members of society, but then again we do have many welfare families living off the system who are teaching their children to do the same when they grow up so perhaps you are right.
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My error – I should have said Hitler was claiming the youth of the time were behind him. And it wasn’t the righteousness of his philosophy that aligned them with him, it was the fact that no other perspective was presented to them. This resort to total control of information isn’t a feature of Naziism, it’s a feature of any dictatorship, whether of the left or the right. Look at the proliferation of parochial schools in this country over the past decade or two. Certainly part of their raison d’etre was to give the white kids a place to go, a refuge from blacks and Latinos, but an important fringe benefit not lost on their administrators and parents is that they have greater control over what children are taught. Do you know that schoolbooks published by Bob Jones University Press teach that humans co-existed with dinossaurs and that fire-breathing dragons were probably real? And that slavery, the depression, and the KKK all were not nearly as bad as we liberals paint them?
And Ms. Harris-Perry didn’t say that parents shouldn’t be trusted to teach their children to become functioning members of society – that’s just something you made up and threw in, perhaps for seasoning.
Actually, it was Mr. George Bernard Shaw who said “There may be some doubt as to who are the best people to have charge of children, but there can be no doubt that parents are the worst.”
Take good care, and may God bless us all!
TGY
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As far as no other perspective being offered to children in Germany, do you really think any perspective other than a liberal one is being offered in the public schools today? If so it isn’t common and maybe, just maybe, some parents feel their children will get a better education if they attend a Catholic (non-government) school but you just painted many of these people as racists.
When she says we have to get over the notion that children belong to their parents and we need to teach them they belong to a community she is insinuating that the parents aren’t doing that when many of us are. And when you say, “I’d hate to think what sort of society we’ll become if we teach these children to make sure they’ve got theirs, and to hell with everyone else,” you are insinuating the same.
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I forgot to mention that I find it interesting you now see an endearing side to President Bush now that many conservatives have come around to your position on some issues conserning the former president.
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Lots of school subjects are objective – there are really no liberal or conservative perspectives on things like chemistry or math.
History . . . well, as they say, history books are written by the winners.
Suggesting that some people sent their children to religious schools for reasons rooted in racism was no mistake on my part – I meant it because it’s true. I certainly don’t think they’re all racists. I also painted many of them as witting or unwitting sponsors of ignorance if they’re going to let their children be taught some of the things I mentioned.
Again, you are putting words into Ms. Harris-Perry’s mouth. She never said that we have to teach children that they belong to a community. What she implied, and obviously not very successfully, is that we need to do a better job, as a society, of taking responsibility for the children. All of them, without differentiation for this one’s mine and that one’s yours.
Part of it is what I experienced growing up on West 13th St in New York City, in the northern end of Greenwich Village. Every day we’d all be sent out in the street to play, and there was a platoon of mothers who sat by their windows and kept an eye on us. And God help you of Dennis’ mom called your mom and told her that you got into a fight, or she heard you yelling the “F” word.
And I really hate to think what would have happened if some perv had tried anything funny with any of us. A bunch of Irish and italian parents would have made short work of such a fool.
This is in large part what Harris-Perry is talking about – the same thing meant by that old African proverb, “It takes a village to raise a child.”
As to Mr. Bush, I’ve never been an all-or-nothing kind of guy, and I saw things to like in him from the very beginning. I just never thought he should have been President. And the story I told, I believe I told it years ago on this site, while he was still in office. So I wouldn’t characterize myself as having changed my opinion of him.
Take good care and may God bless us all!
TGY
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“not invested enough” blahblahblah. We have about, if not the, highest amount spent on “education” on the planet, with very nearly the worst results.
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It is kind of like Biden’s argument that we can’t enforce the gun laws on the books so we need to implement more, isn’t it?
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Absolutely, Steve. These people are that amazingly special kind of stupid, aren’t they?
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And they are our “leaders!”
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We come in second in per capita spending on education, just behind Switzerland. You’re also right in observing that our results are nowhere near the top.I’ve read some interesting things about other nations’ systems. What I don’t know is if their political and moral elites spend as much time trying to bully their education systems as happens in this country. We get all upset when politicians interfer in military operations – perhaps we should be equally concerned about them interfering in education.
It wasn’t always this way. The US once had a very good system of public education. In his book Plunkitt of Tammany Hall, George Washington Plunkitt observed that politicians of both parties could always be relied on to play politics with every element of governing a big city – except the schools. Mess with their children’s educations, he said, and hordes of parents would drive you from office in a heartbeat.
As I said, things once were different.
Take good care, and may God bless us all!
TGY
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Well, TGY, they don’t seem to have done just a whole fuck of a lot about the public education debacle overall. It’s all about feeeeewings now. Once upon a time we were the absolute top of the world in everything. If not the #1, we were in the top 5. Now? Shit. We had the top scientists, we made the best you-name-it, and then the hippies shaved, cut their hair, and infiltrated our leadership. Yeah, I was a long-haired, dope smokin’, outlaw biker back in my early years. But I was ALWAYS proud of my nation, of our excellence in the world. All of my brothers were vets who had done their time in the SEA. I never dreamed that what HAS happened would. I JOINED the military while VN was still on, to go do what I must if I had to. I spent 20 years of my life protecting this country against what got voted in. But I was born back in the 50’s, when this shit was inconceivable. We should have known, but it just wasn’t possible. It happened, more the fools us.
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Yes, the hippies decided if they really wanted change they could best do it by infiltrating the system and that is exactly what they have done.
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Totalatarians must control total. Sometimes their long-term goals are revealed to those who are paying attention.
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And control begins with education!
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I have run into her several other times when flipping through the channels. One of the most obnoxious on msnbc. One generation almost lost.
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One of the most obnoxious on MSNBC? That is really saying something!
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If memory serves me correctly is was the wife of our first cunilingual president and soon to be our next president, Hillary ” what’s the difference” Clinton, who wrote in her book that it takes a village to raise a child. Actually we taxpayers have been paying through the nose for years to raise the intergenerational dependency class. As the Soviets knew all too well, there is no news in the truth and no truth in the news.
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Yep, this mindset is nothing new at all. They have been at it for years and are just now really starting to “come out of the closet.”
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Actually, the African proverb “It takes a village to raise a child” predated Mrs. Clinton’s book by several centuries or even millennia. She did not take credit for coining the phrase, which was actually the title of her book.
Take good care, and may God bless us all!
TGY
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Yeah, the problem with that is that it does take the village in that situation, because if there are any weak links in the unity of the village many die due to the hole left by one. You could tie that to “We must all stand together, or we will certainly hang separately” I suppose. But that supposes that everyone stands together for the good of the village as a whole, not infighting to gain control of this little chunk of the village for this group, that section for another.
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So, how did that work out for the village?
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She didn’t take credit for the debacle in Benghazi either. At least she’s consistent.
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You have point there.
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sounds very commune like…as in communistic.
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Exactly!
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