Cedric Chang wrote:

>>>> Parents should not "own" children.  Nor ( most definitely ) should the
>>>> state.

>> The Nazis and the fascists did it.  The communists did it.  It was
>> originally the position that Karl Marx took and published in The
>> Manifesto of The Communist Party, in 1848. Hillary Clinton suggests as
>> much in her book It Takes a Village.  The intention was to grow the
>> children in the state ideology.  

> My suggestion is totally different from what was planned by the Nazis,
> Hillary, Marx, John Dewey, Bismark, or Horace Mann. Conflating my
> comment with the above idiots is misleading and unfair.

I thought so too, and I was surprised, as usually Rich doesn't seem to do
such things. Bringing an idea next to something "communist" is in the US a
simple cheap shot that more often than not ends any useful exchange of
ideas. (There is a solid history of such behavior...) Besides, the fact
that Marx had the same position doesn't say anything about an idea. He
probably thought that breathing was good for your health... you'd stop
breathing because of that? :)

The idea of the children not "belonging" to the parents, to the family, but
rather having a bigger circle of "upbringing resources" is not so recent as
fascists or Marx. It probably pre-dates most of the Christian
(totalitarian) roots our culture is based on. Children belonging to, being
some form of property of, their parents may feel natural to some or most,
but there's nothing inherent natural in the type of family structure that
Western culture is based on. And it brings forth enough aberrations that
questioning it from time to time just seems healthy.

The idea of family is one of the roots of Monarchism, FWIW. And the idea
that no group of people can work as well as an individual is not
necessarily always a positive one (protecting the rights of the
individual), but also sometimes a negative one (standing in the way of
allowing our race to develop the necessary traits to make communities
work).

Gerhard

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