Thursday, May 07, 2015

All Children Left Behind

by JASmius



Did you (for geezers with grown kids, like me) or do you (for you youngin' parents out there) read to your children?  It's been pretty common knowledge for a long time that if you read to your children, they will be more likely to fall in love with the written word themselves, and consequently do better in school.  This has always been considered a good thing and part of loving, responsible parenting.....

....until now.  Now it's "unfairly holding back the illiterate".  Because only the almighty state is supposed to raise your children that are no longer yours:

According to a professor at the University of Warwick in England, parents who read to their kids should be thinking about how they’re “unfairly disadvantaging other people’s children” by doing so.

Because how dare you love and do what's best for your own children, and because of that they should be taken away from you and handed over the state to ensure that they grow up as ignorant and illiterate and alienated from society as "other people's children".  Because, "fairness".

In an interview with ABC Radio last week, philosopher and professor Adam Swift said that since “bedtime stories activities . . . do indeed foster and produce . . . [desired] familial relationship goods,” he wouldn't want to ban them....

Yet.

....but that parents who “engage in bedtime-stories activities” should definitely at least feel kinda bad about it sometimes:

“I don’t think parents reading their children bedtime stories should constantly have in their minds the way that they are unfairly disadvantaging other people’s children, but I think they should have that thought occasionally,” he said.

The logic of which is that the children of irresponsible and indifferent parents should be taken away from them and given to loving, responsible parents to raise properly.  Kinda suggests that "Professor" "Swift" (gotta love the irony of that name) hasn't thought this idea of his through very well, doesn't it?

Maybe he wasn't read to enough by his folks when he was little.

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