Wednesday, May 4, 2011

Arguments Against Private Education

Note: This post has been edited. See comments and next post.

"Your children are not yours, they are mine. Their childhood is not theirs, it is mine to waste as I wish. Their future is not theirs, it is mine to destroy. Their minds are not theirs, they are mine to fill with what I want, or to leave empty to feed only upon themselves. Your hearts are not yours, your ambition must not exist, your effort is without value, your dreams and your children's dreams must be no more than fantasy, because I do not want them to be fulfilled. We will take your children from you, they will have nowhere to hide. We might pay them some attention, we might indoctrinate them, we might ignore them, we will certainly ignore you, we might brutalize them. When we hand them back, they might well be ignorant and useless, they might be unfit for the world they have to live in, they might not be what you wanted them to be, or what you could have made them into, but we will tell you that they have received the finest education and that any deficiency is your own fault for expecting more of your child."

The sheer naked venom and bile with which some people express their hatred of anyone who has been modestly success, and by some mixture of luck, hard work and sacrifice chooses to go their own way in the world, ignoring the government, is actually quite shocking.

2 comments:

Vincent said...

I thought your link would point to something Ms Rosoff had written in the Guardian, or an article in which she had spoken your quoted words. You’ve rather got it in for her, misspelling her name apparently and putting words into her mouth. I'd still like to see a link which demonstrates the interesting line in venom and bile you accuse her of.

The Hickory Wind said...

I am suitably chastened. Anger can be very creative, but it can also obscure reason. Only after reading your comment did I realise that I had put those words into the mouth of a women whose name just happened to be in front of me when I wrote them.