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Posted on 05/04/2015 9:20:20 PM PDT by 2ndDivisionVet
Schools that do everything parents should are not schools. They're orphanages.
The city fathers of Buffalo, New York are considering what they call “public boarding schools,” “where students as young as first or second grade would be assured proper meals, uniforms, after-school tutoring and activities.”
“We have teachers and union leaders telling us, ‘The problem is with the homes; these kids are in dysfunctional homes,'” Buffalo school board member Carl Paladino told the Huffington Post. The “Buffalo Institute of Growth would supplement a college-style academic schedule with life skills and social activities that would keep students on campus seven days a week…”
This isn’t an isolated discussion. In Madison, Wisconsin, a local foundation recently shelled out $300,000 to help the district create four “full-service schools,” which is a euphemism for “take over basically every salient aspect of parenting.” This includes health care, dental care, after-school and weekend babysitting, meals and snacks, and parenting (although Madison schools have renamed that “mentoring” so it’s more appropriately generic).
Of course, behind every statist program you’ll find the Obama administration, which has for its tenure been busily shelling out your kids’ money (because it’s all debt spending now) to “help” public schools transform into similar incarnations of modern orphanages. They’re not even quiet about their ambition to program children “from cradle through college and career.”
The Promise Neighborhoods initiative, which is just one arm of a multipronged effort, wants “cradle-to-career solutions” that “integrate programs” and “break down agency ‘silos'” for comprehensive government-run life planning. All on behalf of the children, as usual. These are already in at least 20 states.
Boarding Schools and Orphanages Aren’t Necessarily Bad
Before some analysis, first the necessary caveats.
Boarding schools are not necessarily evil. My husband attended a boarding high school, and it was neither one of those “military school” halfway houses for troubled kids nor an elite school for wealthy kids with detached parents. There was no Christian high school anywhere near his family’s home, and it was really important to their family that the children attend one, so they ate margarine and rice and sent their six kids on partial scholarships to their alma mater in the Missouri boondocks 900 miles away. If only every parent was that dedicated to his child’s success, right? And if only every child had the opportunity to use his education tax dollars to attend such a school if his family felt the need.
I also understand the need to remove some kids from terrible homes. That’s why we have a foster-care system. The Federalist has also published some poignant writing from a graduate of a 1950s orphanage who has spent his academic career researching their modern incarnation: group foster-care homes. He argues they are not right for all displaced children but are perfect for some. It’s perfectly plausible that kids of widely diverging personalities, family situations, and abuse histories will need widely diverging modes of restoration.
The Default Should Be Home, Not an Institution
Look, we all recognize the sad truth that some children’s families are not safe places for them. A just society removes such innocents from their messed-up parents when it is truly necessary, and places them in real homes where they might have a fairer shot at life.
But that’s not we’re talking about here. We’re talking about assigning a kid to full-time government oversight simply because his parents have less money than some others, or because his family speaks a language other than English at home. These situations are not inherently abusive. Government owes parents and children proof their relationship is causing permanent and abominable damage before it reaches to separate the two. It’s entirely offensive to poor and minority families to tell them these qualities alone require society to remove their children.
It’s also wrong. How does it make sense to think that hired hands will be better at meeting children’s needs than their own flesh and blood? How does it make sense to think that shuffling children into some mechanical, preset series of government programs will nurture their beings better than weeding and feeding within the organic ecosystem in which they first bloomed to life? Families were made for children. They’re the natural place children abound. When a habitat is sick, we don’t call it restored if someone comes in, pours concrete, and builds a pile of cubicle holders on top. We call it destroyed, and we mourn that destruction.
This Is an Inevitable Consequence of Big Government
One could easily consider “full-service schools” a form of damage control politicians need to cover the evidence that their policies of paying people to have babies outside of marriage and creating a false sense of security with “free” birth control for everyone have contributed to skyrocketing rates of children born to inherently unstable homes, with attendant increases in child abuse and neglect.
Ultimately, though, the increasing conversion of schools into orphanages only makes obvious what is already true about American society: We’re already a cradle-to-grave welfare state. Government oversees children from before birth through programs like WIC, which gives poor pregnant and nursing moms “free” health care and food. It then oversees children from birth through adulthood with health care from Medicaid, food from SNAP and school breakfast and lunch (and sometimes dinner), rent subsidies and low-income housing, out-of-home early childcare and parenting through child-care vouchers and Head Start, even more babysitting through make-work after-school programs, and more. We pay for millions of kids’ college tuition, “workforce training,” hell, even their cell phones. Next we’ll be supplying them with iPads. Oh, wait.
The Obama administration is merely rearranging this reality, trying to streamline all the pre-existing welfare into one centralized orphanage people can stay in even after they reach 18. At least they’re honest. Given Republicans’ penchant for efficiency in government control rather than concern about reducing it, they might as well be honest, too, and cheer Obama for using the money and power they keep giving the federal government instead of pretending he’s some antagonist to their long-proclaimed but long-abandoned principles.
Quite frankly, this may be what is exactly needed. Put the inner city kids in boarding-like schools and force them to be educated. They may be kicking and screaming, but it might also solve a lot of problems.
Imagine in a generation or two what the positive outcomes could be.
They’ll get the same Marxist indoctrination, along with discipline and order? No thanks.
It’s a Brave New World out there.
Obviously not. A real education, based on the old classical model.
It wouldn’t be a solution if they weren’t getting a real education. Obviously basic arithmetic and English skills would already do a lot.
Imagine if they actually got even more than that, real civics and history classes. Science classes even.
So it is a good idea to have these left wing socialist ineptocracies raise our kids? Maybe it could cut down on abortions.
Teachers and union leaders? LOL!!!
The homes are dysfunctional because Democrats have created a dysfunctional sub-culture.
And who are some of the scumbags who support those Democrat policies?
Why, teachers and union leaders, of course.
Another fine example of Democrats creating chaos, so they can then claim to have a cure for the chaos.
God help us.
funded by the government? Not likely
Anything that gives them EVEN more job security and money they will be happy about. I know a number of teachers in new York. No comment on them.
Hartford, CT had a school superintendent named Anthony Amato. He very much wanted to make each school a center for health care/dental, meals, before and after school care, social services, year-round schools...yada.
He pretty died a failure a few years ago. His persuasions were toward total socialism for schools.
I can’t imagine what his *ideas* would have cost ....since Hartford was [and is] broke. Fortunately he was asked to leave his position. NOL got him for a time.
This notion of taking the kids from cradle to grave is in effect and taking place in very small increments, in urban centers. Socialism creep.
Have you seen what they pay school superintendents these days, even in tiny districts?
Government schooling was intended and designed to destroy the family—focusing on destroying the father-son relationship. Now they have succeeded, so it’s time for the children to move into the school.
There will not be positive outcomes, because government schools are INTENDED to produce illiterates, whether the schools are orphanages or not.
Never mind the supers....principals are all 6 figures.
Our *award winning* school system in a town of about 30K had a problem passing the school budget b/c so few admins and teachers, that they had projected, were not retiring.
Now that children of employees can stay on the parent’s insurance until they’re 26.....employees are hanging in there longer.
Retired principals here, spend their time working in temp positions....making scale, for extended periods of time. Very lucrative for them.
What *father-son relationships*?
There are no fathers....they’re all in jail. Mom is a junkie, possibly a hooker. The black adults did this to themselves.
For later
I was talking about the Progressives. Woodrow Wilson, John Dewey, the whole crowd. One of the main purposes of government schooling was to eliminate Christianity by eliminating the families by which it is transmitted.
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