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October 26, 2009
Exclusive: A Czar of Early Political Indoctrination May be Coming to a Neighborhood Near You
Sen. Henry Jackson (D-WA) once compared the Soviet Union to a hotel burglar –relentlessly sneaking door-to-door looking for an unlocked one so as to eventually ply his trade. Today’s radical left shares this burglar mentality – keep trying and trying, let no opportunity pass, and eventually diligence will pay off and the Big Sister Nanny State will micromanage our lives.
It is not easy to defend against this totalitarianism on the pennies-a-day installment plan. Ordinary citizens seldom notice its carbon monoxide-like character and its goals typically seem almost Motherhood and Apple pie. Who has the time to inspect every sheep to see if a wolf lies beneath outward appearances?
With this in mind let me offer a lesson in how radicals play this devious game and with a familiar subject – daycare (called “universal pre-kindergarten” by big government advocates). The script is always the same – discover some “crisis” that ostensibly requires remediation, suggest an attractive “sure-fire” solution involving Washington’s intercession and if everything goes according to plan, Big Sister will be calling the shots in ways once unimaginable.
Let’s begin with daycare options. There are essentially three alternatives. The most generic, often cheapest is the “neighborhood grandma.” Her “credential” is “I raised six of my own.” No danger here. Next are varied fee-based daycare centers ranging from inexpensive Church basements to upscale “learning centers” with names like Le Petite Academy. Again, no problem. The third option is government-run daycare with its explicit “enrichment” mission, and here the opportunities for political mischief are immense. The fact that these target the politically unsophisticated poor calls for vigilance. After all, what economically hard-pressed mother will turn down free daycare even if infused with iffy political baggage? Such children are the perfect captive audience for those intent on refurbishing society.
These government-funded centers are already big business and are expanding. The well-known Head Start program currently consumes $6.8 billion of taxpayer money annually and not even skeptical skin-flint Republicans dare question it. Thirty-eight states plus the Washington, D.C. offer separate “pre-kindergartens” and it is estimated that more than three-quarters of a million youngsters participate in these Head Start alternative, and enrollments grow annually. Despite fiscal tribulations, funding for state-based “pre-kindergarten” is expected to increase by $5.2 billion in fiscal 2010. Who can possibly resist?
Now, if adequate daycare – decent meals, supervised play, being read to – were the only aim, a government financed, ideology-free solution would be just distributing vouchers redeemable at private providers, including all the local Grandmas or Petite Academies. But, this keeps Washington out, and who knows what might filter into all those unsupervised tabula rasa minds? In other words, Uncle Sam needs an excuse to preempt Grandma, even Mom and Pop, or at least ensure that caregivers get it “right” (or more likely, get it “left”).
To the rescue comes a gift-from-the-gods rationale: closing cognitive gaps across ethnic racial lines. For the slogan minded: quality IQ boosting intervention, not custodial warehousing the poor. Here’s the recipe for turning millions of kids over to the Early Indoctrination Czar. First, proclaim that all racial/ethnic groups are born with identical average levels of cognitive talent. That this “fact” is impossible to demonstrate scientifically only adds to the politically allure – it is knowledge by fatwa. Second, convince Americans that early signs of unequal cognitive ability are a “serious problem” and like all “serious problems,” a government program is the best solution. If skeptics insist that unequal test performance is just human nature, keep shouting “How can you condemn these children to a life of poverty, crime and depravity. Have you no compassion for the less fortunate?”
Outsiders cannot possibly imagine the pervasiveness of this unchallenged orthodoxy. Even erstwhile limited-government conservatives fail to see the danger. (Personal aside: I have impolitely raised the possibility of unwelcome government intervention in early family life to free-market conservatives and they responded with blank stares. Table talk then continued as if nothing happened.) No matter that nothing has ever succeeded. Head Start was initiated in 1965 as a sure-to-succeed panacea to insure that poorer children (especially African-Americans) received all the benefits, from cognitive stimulation to medical attention that would permit them to catch up academically with middle class cohorts. The estimated cost has been $100 billion since inception, and while its popularity suggests accomplishment, hundreds of scientific studies clearly show that has failed in to close academic achievement gaps. Not even mighty Big Bird, let alone the Cookie Monster and the rest of the Sesame Street gang, have succeeded (gap closing was the show’s original justification).
But, like a diligent hotel burglar, the left is relentless and decades of expensive failure seems smoking gun proof that something more is at stake than intellectual equality. If Washington applied the scientific standards used for drug trials, early childhood intervention schemes would have been abandoned decades ago though, to be fair, justifications can be made in terms of better health monitoring or providing jobs to local residents.
Needless to say, the liberal mainstream media is happy to acquiesce in this futile scheme to replace the nice basement-dwelling Methodist ladies with Big Sister Apparatchiki (government hacks under communism). A recent New York Times article (October 21, 2009) was headlined “Hispanic Immigrants’ Children Fall Behind Peers Early, Study Finds.” The gist of the reported study was that while Hispanic mothers provide excellent physical care to their children, and their children do fine cognitively for the first 15 months. At 24 months, however, their offspring quickly fall behind middle-class whites, a pattern that similarly applies to blacks and poor whites. So, in the contest to achieve economic success, middle-class whites are edging ahead even before kindergarten. The Times quotes Eugene Garcia, an education professor at Arizona State College saying that early intervention is necessary. This sentiment is seconded by Carmen Rodriguez, Director of Columbia University’s Head Start program. Nothing is even hinted that this mental ability gap is intractable despite spending countless billions to close it. The unsophisticated Times reader would also conclude that intellectual differences would vanish if poverty were eliminated; the equally plausible supposition that cognitive inequality causes poverty is, predictably, unspeakable.
More is involved than just professors yet again embracing an expanded social welfare state. A gambler’s fallacy thrives here: just keep doubling up until you hit the jackpot. President Obama’s stimulus package included $3 billion for Head Start pre-schools (on top of what is already spent) and the House recently passed a bill authorizing $8 billion over eight years to upgrade this early intervention. Rest assured, these expensive initiates will fall short, and the reaction will be more money and, quite likely, more forceful intrusion into the home lives of families who “fail” their children.
What might this doubling up look like? Forget better nutrition and health care, since these are already available (though not always utilized, save making kids fat with junk food). Also forget about distributing pamphlets about good parenting or periodic social worker visits. These cannot address “root causes.” If the radical egalitarians are serious about marshalling state power to level early cognitive equality (and rest assured, they are), the only solution is to usurp Mom and Pop. Regardless of intentions, these biological progenitors cannot mimic white middle-class parents partial to big words and complex sentences. The New Nanny State World Order may well require daily listening Mozart and similar “middle class” enrichments to build more neurons and synapses so necessary to attending Harvard.
That parents of intellectually impoverished children may not want their offspring “rescued,” might find the busy-body cognitive specialist a pest, may well be quite happy with junior’s paltry vocabulary, and prefer he learns welding, not rocket science, is irrelevant. Nor does it make any difference that the scientific evidence unambiguously shows that except in extreme circumstances (e.g., a dietary deficiency) cognitive ability cannot be substantially boosted. The egalitarian Big Sister is on a mission, and what do Mom and Pop know about the hard road to equality?
The almost guaranteed failure to narrow gaps will not, however, mean total disappointment. There is always ideological baggage to impose regardless of unmoved IQ scores. This access to millions of poor kids under the guise of helping the downtrodden is the monster in sheep’s clothing. And what should these deprived children learn to, supposedly, get those additional neurons up and running? Reading about how Alexander the Great slaughtered the Persians? How the Constitution promotes limited government? Fat chance. If what is being taught in today’s cutting-edge education schools predicts content, youngsters will be put on a diet of politically correct nonsense. More likely, youngsters will be mentally “challenged” by being told that Alexander the Great was a homosexual and that the Constitution failed to liberate enslaved people and banned women from voting. That few toddlers will have any idea of what the teacher is talking about makes no difference – it’s the stimulating newness and volume of content that matters.
Worse, this campaign offers a standing invitation for every politically connected grievance group to try and shape young minds. This is exactly what has occurred with the K-12 curriculum. So many impressionable little minds, so little time. For today’s Ed School experts, the best way for Juan to catch John might be teach him some Marxist vocabulary so he can discern white middle-class privileged. Consciousness raising now becomes both political and physical – Marxist jargon is now redefined as “mental stimulation.” See Dick exploit Jane. Where does Sally fit in the family hierarchy? Now children, what do “exploit” and “family hierarchy” mean, and can you give some examples from your own family? Neurons and synapses stimulated; Harvard, here we come.
So, be alert to some do-gooder sheep-like creature demanding free early intervention to boost deficient cognitive development. Such intellectual leveling will fail but it will bring the evil Big Sister into your household, and rest assured, she will not rest until the family, that archaic bulwark of capitalism, is supplanted by egalitarian experts.
FamilySecurityMatters.org Contributing Editor Robert Weissberg is emeritus professor of political science, University of Illinois-Urbana and currently an adjunct instructor at New York University Department of Politics (graduate). He has written many books, the most recent include The Limits of Civic Activism, Pernicious Tolerance: How teaching to "accept differences" undermines civil society and the forthcoming, Bad Students, Not Bad Schools: How both the Right and the Left have American education wrong (early 2010). Besides writing for professional journals, he has also written for magazines like the Weekly Standard and currently contributes to various blogs.
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