Criticizing Cradle-Robbing

Hooray! I was referenced in The New York Times this week! Well, sorta.

In Wednesday's paper, Timesman David Leonhardt puffed Oklahoma's, um, "early childhood education" efforts. My favorite graf:

The biggest preschool opponents tend to be religious conservatives worried about the creation of a nanny state. “There are plenty of critics,” Brad Henry, Oklahoma’s Democratic governor, told me, shortly before calling for universal preschool for 3-year-olds in his State of the State address on Monday. “We’ll just have to make the case.”

Plenty of critics, indeed. Of whom I am chief. I'm the guy who commissioned and published the 2001 report Blueprint for a Nanny State (a useful rebuttal, by the way, to Leonhardt's agenda journalism), and frankly I'm pleased to know the left is still wigging out over the phrase. I have criticized, and will continue to criticize, policies which favor more government spending on nonparental care over policies which encourage parents to spend more time raising their own children at home.

Look, our state constitution originally required compulsory school attendance for children “between the ages of eight and sixteen years, for at least three months in the year.” The legislature later expanded the school year and lowered the age to seven, then to five. Today, an astonishing 70 percent of Oklahoma’s four-year-olds are in state prekindergarten.

How low can they go? I’m reminded of the fire captain’s remark in Ray Bradbury’s dystopian novel Fahrenheit 451: “We’ve lowered the kindergarten age year after year until now we’re almost snatching them from the cradle.”

Indeed, Mr. and Mrs. Henry and their allies, not content with having the state institutionalize five-year-olds and four-year-olds, now want to snatch up the three-year-olds.

And there’s simply no reason to believe these well-meaning “child advocates” intend to stop there. Many of these folks are politicians, bureaucrats, lobbyists, or political activists with a vested interest – political and/or economic – in the expansion of “early childhood education” (i.e., preschool daycare). Anyone who takes the time to read the 2000 Oklahoma task force report on the matter will see that, indeed, it outlines nothing less than a blueprint for a state-run daycare, health care, and education system for children from the womb through age five. And according to the 2006-07 resolutions of the nation's largest school-employee labor union, "the National Education Association supports early childhood education programs in the public schools for children from birth through age eight."

Unsurprisingly, many of us "critics" are genuinely troubled by all this enthusiasm for surrogate parenting. We agree with Mary Eberstadt: Babies and toddlers, “too young to speak for themselves, deserve advocates, too.”

Mrs. Eberstadt is a scholar at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution and author of the 2004 book Home-Alone America: The Hidden Toll of Day Care, Behavioral Drugs, and Other Parent Substitutes. Heritage Foundation trustee Midge Decter calls it “one of the most important books to have come along in a very long time.”

So let’s have some child advocacy for the crying babies in rows of cribs, their arms outstretched, desperate to be picked up and held by their mothers. They deserve advocates, too.

Let’s have some advocacy for the little girl who would love to sit on the floor and play quietly with her mother, but instead is surrounded for 10 hours a day, five days a week, by a dozen or more babbling and screaming children, one of whom has a penchant for biting her on the shoulder.

And let’s not forget the downcast three-year-olds with vacant looks on their faces, feeling abandoned and lonely and stressed as they’re shuffled off to “school.” They deserve advocates, too.

Yes, Governor Henry, as long as the mercury keeps rising – and the age of institutionalized children keeps falling – you can bet that "critics" will continue to speak out. For the children.