By Dr. Harold Pease

By now most have heard of MSNBC host Melissa Harris-Perry’s recorded commercial in which she stated that children do not belong to their parents, but are instead the responsibility of the members of their community. She said, “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 as our children.” Her solution, “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.”

She is expressing what is a common underlying belief in the socialist world; government should raise and educate the children. Most who espouse this philosophy seek an expanded role for the central government. When this notion is openly expressed, as she did, a nation is in the advanced stages of socialism.

In 1975 the book, From Under The Rubble, authored by a variety of Soviet dissidents, all but one of whom were still living in the USSR, was published in the West. The participants were fully aware that their commentary on the socialist system, smuggled to the “Free World,” would undoubtedly unleash the wrath of the Soviet Bear and result in imprisonment, torture, and possibly death for them. Nonetheless, they felt that the West could avoid the loss of freedom that they experienced if only it were warned.

Igor Shafarevich, a corresponding member of the Soviet Academy of Sciences and former Laureate of the Lenin Prize, attempted, in his chapter of the book, “Socialism in Our Past and Future,” to tell the West what socialism eventually worked out to be in practice. This is, of course, after any significant means of resistance had been removed by gun control. A tyrannical government cannot tolerate a population that can resist it. They must have a monopoly on force.

Socialism, wrote Shafarevich, resulted in complete control of private property, which was defined as anything that existed including one’s own family and person. This included subordination of the individual to the power of the bureaucracy and state control of everyday life. For the USSR socialism meant the destruction of the family as the basic institution of society and the rearing of children away from their parents in state schools or daycare centers.

The word education, or anything like unto it, is not in the U.S. Constitution and therefore, as per Amendment 10, is a state, county, city, or parental responsibility. The word education is too close to the word propaganda to allow the central government to have any role in it. Even Plato questioned the attributes of a “proper” education. A “proper education” for Richard Nixon would have excluded Watergate; for Bill Clinton that the Branch Davidians set themselves on fire, for George W. Bush, that we invaded Iraq because they were involved in 9 11, and for Barack Obama the exclusion of Benghazi and Fast and Furious fiascos. This is why the Founding Fathers gave the federal government no influence over education. Today Joseph Stalin is the second most famous person in Russia because a “proper” education there excludes any reference to his millions of mass murders. The hand that rocks the cradle, or decides what a “proper” education is, rules the world and in a free society that hand can never be the government.

No, Ms. Harris-Perry, the federal government should have no public investment in education. Johnny’s mother cares more whether he or his friends can read than any bureaucrat in Washington D. C. That is why we place her on the local school board. Families and parents best foster creativity, incentive and love of learning. Certainly many parents fail to provide the model that they should and that is why grandparents and relatives, sometimes friends, step in.

Your endless bureaucratic programs and central planning pale in comparison to what can be achieved at the local level under freedom. George W. Bush’s “No Child Left Behind” left all children behind as will Barack Obama’s “Race to the Top” program. Socialism has never produced the scientists and great minds that freedom has and never will. Our children are not government property.

View video of Melissa Harris-Perry remarks: http://www.foxnews.com/entertainment/2013/04/09/critics-slam-msnbc-hosts-claim-that-kids-belong-to-community-not-parents/#ixzz2RtvSf0SZ