Leave No Child's Behind

Wm Norman Grigg writes brilliantly about the increasingly intrusive child welfare industry, one of my pet subjects and a source of many a rant. It is truly frightening when folks argue that children belong to the state or to “society” because this forms the predicate for the most tyrannical intrusions and extractions. Even otherwise decent people of my acquaintance may be heard to argue that everyone in society benefits from or is affected by the education and rearing of children and that this creates an obligation, enforceable by violence, to fund public education and child welfare. After all, these children are going to be funding our retirements some day, so we had better make sure they are healthy and well reared. Children are, in essence, slaves to be trained and fattened for a life of labor in support of the state.

What is not widely understood is that the child welfare and educational apparatus cannot achieve the grandiose results that its proponents and constituents promise. Even if you embedded a social worker in every household, enough of them would be sufficiently incompetent or apathetic to defeat the plans of the agencies to transform families in accordance with the central planners’ model. Even if every child had his own individual teacher a quarter or more of the children would still turn out to be stupid. They would be “left behind” so to speak.

The Secretary of Education was on The Daily Show repeat last night, and she discussed “No Child Left Behind”. She did not suggest that NCLB was “working” or had shown results, but she seemed to believe in its underlying premise, i.e. that every child is equally educable so that the failure of any child is due to bad teachers or inadequate funding of schools. Teachers have long claimed that better teachers make for better students and that throwing more money at teachers is the way to go. Now they have been taken at their word, and those teachers unlucky enough to work in poorer districts are going to be blamed for test results over which, truth be told, they have almost no influence.

So in the end we get tyrannical programs without any of the intended results. And when the programs fail, their advocates proclaim that they were inadequately funded so that failure is rewarded with more resources and more power. This cycle goes on and on because nobody will admit that the underlying premise of the programs is insane.