C is for ...
Back in my previous professional incarnation, I managed the development of Sesame Street's 30th Anniversary Trivia Game.Having grown up on Sesame Street, I found the project warmly nostalgic and quite rewarding.
There were a few new faces among the muppet cast of our trivia game, but mostly it was my old friends.
As my babymomma and I start window-shopping for baby clothes, toys, children's books, nursery sets, etc., I find I have an ambivalent reaction to all the Disney and Sesame Street merchandise. I'm not nearly so anti- "commercial culture" as I once was, and I like the idea of my child having the same characters in his or her life as I did. But I also wonder how much authority we're unwittingly handing over to those whose values and agenda are different from ours.
This sort of thing is especially present for me as I begin to look into homeschooling. As much as secular homeschooling is taking off, the foundation of the movement is still Christian, and despite the far superior academic results of an at-home education, the primary motive for teaching the kids at home is still sociological: they don't want the Enemy's message infecting their children.
I find I don't have to be religious to sympathize. All it takes is a strong belief contrary to the mainstream ideology. Their enemy is Satan; mine is the State.
I was schooled in statism. If you think the idea is paranoid, I can only imagine that statism is still your unquestioned foundational assumption.
Going back through some old articles on Mises.org, I find this ominous piece of recent history:
For many years, voluntary compliance has been falling. In anticipation of this problem, the Census Bureau has been relying on wholly owned sectors of society to propagandize for its campaign. The Sesame Street character named Count von Count is touring public schools to tell the kids to tell their parents to fill out the census, even as more than 1 million census kits have been sent to public schools around the country. Think of it as the state using children to manipulate their parents into becoming volunteers in the civic planning project.
"The Census and Despotism"
by Llewellyn H. Rockwell, Jr.
by Llewellyn H. Rockwell, Jr.
2 Comments:
"As much as secular homeschooling is taking off, the foundation of the movement is still Christian": It so happens that a biography of Rousseau that just went up on Project Gutenberg has a passage in its chapter on Emile that I was reading that indicates that in his day the associations were the opposite: institutional schooling was seen as religious in nature and the move towards home education was associated with secularization of education:
"Education by these and other writers was being conceived in a wider sense than had been known to ages controlled by ecclesiastical collegians. It slowly came to be thought of in connection with the family. The improvement of ideas upon education was only one phase of that great general movement towards the restoration of the family, which was so striking a spectacle in France after the middle of the century. Education now came to comprehend the whole system of the relations between parents and their children, from earliest infancy to maturity. The direction of this wider feeling about such relations tended strongly towards an increased closeness in them, more intimacy, and a more continuous suffusion of tenderness and long attachment. All this was part of the general revival of naturalism. People began to reflect that nature was not likely to have designed infants to be suckled by other women than their own mothers, nor that they should be banished from the society of those who are most concerned in their well-being, from the cheerful hearth and wise affectionate converse of home, to the frigid discipline of colleges and convents and the unamiable monition of strangers.
Then the rising rebellion against the church and its faith perhaps contributed something towards a movement which, if it could not break the religious monopoly of instruction, must at least introduce the parent as a competitor with the priestly instructor for influence over the ideas, habits, and affections of his children."
As much as secular homeschooling is taking off, the foundation of the movement is still Christian, and despite the far superior academic results of an at-home education, the primary motive for teaching the kids at home is still sociological: they don't want the Enemy's message infecting their children.
I'm not sure that this is still true. The NCES survey of homeschooling in 2003 found that "providing religious or moral instruction" was essntially tied with "concern about the environment at other schools."
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