Posted on 05/07/2015 9:03:00 AM PDT by wagglebee
COVENTRY, England, May 7, 2015 (LifeSiteNews.com) -- Parents alert: right now a left-wing philosopher is dreaming up arguments for why you should be stopped from sending your children to private school or take them to church, mosque or synagogue. He’s okay for now with the bedtime stories, however.
His name is Adam Swift, a political philosophy professor at Warwick University in Coventry, a specialist in social justice and especially on how healthy families confer unjust social advantages on their children. This is the subject of his book, Family Values: The Ethics of Parent-Child Relationships, and of a May 3 interview on the Australian Broadcasting Corporation’s web-based program, “The Philosopher’s Zone.”
Socialists have always objected to the way rich parents pass on their wealth to their children without the latter working at all—hence hefty death taxes—but Swift takes this idea several steps further, arguing that being loving confers an even bigger, and more unfair, advantage. And while Swift is willing for parents to be allowed by the state to keep their children at home and even to read them bedtime stories—a particularly iniquitous activity—he thinks their ability to take them to church, synagogue, temple or mosque ought to be restricted.
Judging from ABC’s interview, Swift and his “team” at Warwick U’s Centre for Ethics, Law and Public Affairs have apparently decided that reading bedside stories is acceptable while sending children to private school is not, though according to “child development theory” bedside stories actually deliver a greater social advantage to their children over storyless children, than does sending children to private schools over public schools.
This is because “filial intimate relations”–Swift cannot bring himself to say “love”--between “particular adults” and the children under their authority--whom Swift can’t quite call “parents”--results in psychologically much healthier children who do better in school and adult life than those denied loving childhoods.
Happily, Swift only briefly considers the obvious solution (to the founders of the Soviet Union, anyway), which is “to abolish the family,” before rejecting it as “a really bad idea.” In this trade off, at least, between two good things, equality and healthy child development, the latter wins.
But then Swift considers private schools. These he is ready to toss. The advantage they provide to child development is smaller than that delivered by love—or, as they like to say at the Centre of Ethics, Law and Public Affairs, by “filial intimate relations.” And like inheritance it results in highly unfair, unearned, and unequal conditions between the two classes of offspring. Away with private schools and legacies.
What about parents taking their children to church? asks ABC’s interviewer. Clearly Swift, who admits readily he never goes to church, sees no benefit in it to children at all. (There is, in fact, plenty of empirical evidence of the advantages, collected here by the Marriage and Religion Research Institute).
Swift sees church as a detriment. On the one hand, he finds it acceptable for parents to pass on their preferences for sports (for no apparent reason other than that Swift himself likes taking children along to cricket matches, at least in theory). But on the other, for parents to use their authority to teach children their religious beliefs “we think gives parents too much influence” over “distinct entities with their own moral status.”
But what Swift fails to address is the alternative: if parents do not teach their values to their children, who or what will provide them? The state? The entertainment media? Or, may heaven help us, public universities such as Warwick U? And what is likelier to produce adults who are “distinct entities with their own moral status”? These institutions, or parents?
There could be only one answer for Canadians who have observed closely two recent phenomena: The Ontario government’s desire to deliver its new sex education curriculum, normalizing minority sexual behaviours, to all students without the consent of either parents or children; and the unanimous declaration of all public law school faculties in Canada that the establishment of a rival, private school founded on Christian beliefs would be an intolerable offense against equality: the same value espoused as supreme by Professor Swift of Warwick U.
Satan and his leftist minions will not stop until civilization is destroyed.
The world is going completely mad.
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I am sorry I not going for it LOL!
I think safe to say maybe some Brits tell this guy off
Teaching Christianity to children will be considered child abuse.
This idiot must’ve been an unadopted orphan.................
‘Teaching Christianity to children will be considered child abuse.’
Instruction in the Evangelical form or Conservative Catholicism could indeed be considered ‘child abuse’ if the ‘right’ people get on the SC and decide ‘hate speech’ is not protected by the First Amendment.
Even without that happening I can see that ‘Child Protective Services’ Nazi’s will use this in their war on home schooling and the traditional family. We may becoming like china where the believers have to be very careful and operate an ‘underground church’ partially inside and more outside the regular church structures. Nice thought as to what our country is coming to.
I would say that right now in the USA, there are probably 20-25% of the public who agree with this guy, and they are influential people in the media and universities and public schools and legal profession. It is NOT paranoia to think that this can come about; in fact, versions of it have already been tried.
“Professing themselves to be wise, they became fools.” Romans 1:22
Was that ever more true than in this day?
Good grief, parents are a child’s first teachers.
They are attacking “Nuclear Family Privilege”
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-religion/3287268/posts
Prudence, a virtue, this guy does NOT have.
He should be committed to a mental ward for the public’s safety.
Satan seems to me as a responsibility absolver. An excuse for immorality. A “reason” for mental illness.
“The devil made me do it.”
There is but One God. Not two, or however many more spring forth from this fantasy.
Rant off.
Agreed, but sometimes you have to wonder about the demonic fury with which they react to anything remotely Christian. And I’m not usually a believer in such things.
Adam Swift must have had a traumatic childhood. Sounds like he suffers from Reactive Detachment Disorder.
He needs treatment, if his condition can be treated, but by no means should he be taken seriously as an arbiter of social policy.
Instead of going after parents who are giving their children advantages, why not go after the parents who are NOT doing these things, and tell them to start reading stories to their children, taking them to church, etc.? Notice it’s always tearing down the good, never lifting up the bad.
I’ll surely grant demonic fury.
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