Musings Of An Indie WriterScreeds
Sunday, September 26, 2004
As Flies To Wanton Boys
August 2, 2002
From today’s column by Debra Saunders, we learn that California State Senator Jack O’Connell, a Democrat from San Luis Obispo, recently authored a bill to mandate the teaching of “compassion and respect for both humans and animals” in the state’s schools. The bill was passed by the California Senate and is now before the Assembly.
As with many leftist initiatives, it’s hard to argue with so benevolent and vaguely stated a goal. But beneath the smiling mask of rouge and powder may be a scowling, ugly face, which is why one should resist vague, feel-good legislation on general principles.
Before the Industrial Revolution, the lot of the average man was to labor cruelly hard from early childhood to about age forty, and then die young but exhausted, after first burying the majority of his children. Life was valued at little, which is one reason religious devotion was so much stronger than it is today. Earthly existence was deemed a time of trial, intended solely to test one’s strength of spirit. It was difficult to believe that we were meant to be happy.
Not coincidentally, cruelty to animals was rampant. In medieval France, one common “entertainment” was a contest in which men tried to batter a cat to death with their heads. The cat, of course, was bound to a pole and unable to escape.
Only as technology advanced and capital accumulated did ordinary men find comfort, ease or graciousness in earthly life. Material increments made it possible to value life. They demonstrated that a pain-free state, in which labor need not consume one entirely, was achievable by large numbers. In tandem with those developments, the West saw the beginnings of the anti-animal-cruelty movement. Today’s animal-rights activists would have you believe they’re only trying to conserve, maintain, and extend it.
Today, cruelty, like tyranny, is one of those things that finds no defenders. Doesn’t Alinsky’s Theorem—“If you don’t have an opposition, you don’t have an issue”—apply here? And if so, what concevable need does the state of California, or any locality, have for Senator O’Connell’s bill?
Now, now, let’s not always see the same hands.
Of course it’s a wedge device, an attempt to shoehorn animal-rights doctrine into the government-run schools under a benign-looking cover. Language as vague as that in the bill can be used to enable just about anything except a statewide cat-battering festival. Senator O’Connell admits to having worked with animal-rights activists on the bill. If it becomes law, we may rest assured that they’ll use it to advantage.
California is better known for this sort of development than other states. Partly, that’s due to California’s high percentage of left-wing activists, led by many entertainment-industry figures who secretly enjoy cat-battering succumb to inane “causes” that appeal to their overextended emotions and absorb their excessive free time. But that’s not the whole story.
California is home to nearly forty million people, six million of them children enrolled in the state schools. It has the largest state budget and the largest school system in the United States. For fiscal year 2002-2003, the state government of California plans to spend $32.2 billion on its K-12 schools.
That’s an awfully big pot of money. It’s more than 40% of the total state budget. A lot of people want to get their fingers into it. And a lot of activist groups, the animal-rights groups in particular, would like to get their dogmas into those six million impressionable young minds.
Needless to say, no group will step forward and claim a right to propagandize the young with public funds. That’s about as palatable as cat-battering. So they sculpt their wedges from unexceptionable sentiments that no one can question.
California’s government-school machine has led the nationwide charge against vouchers and homeschooling. In particular, the California Department of Education has tried to demand the same education degrees from homeschooling parents as are required of government-employed teachers. If you’re interested, you can get the details at http://www.californiahomeschool.net.
Since a homeschooled child “leaves the money behind,” forsaking whatever benefits the state schools might provide with his aliquot of funding—in California, it averages about $10,000 per student per year—we know it’s not entirely about the money. The sole alternative explanation is the libido dominandi, the lust for power over those children and their beliefs.
Here in New York, parents have to battle animal-rights propaganda, socialist propaganda, gender-war propaganda, cultural-relativist propaganda, environmentalist propaganda, and innumerable other varieties—usually after teacher-activists have anchored these pernicious dogmas in our children’s minds. I’m here to tell you: the propaganda works horrifyingly well.
Just as California tends to be left of the country as a whole, California parents are more tolerant of educrat activism and non-academic, feel-good schooling than the national average. But even if the educrats’ propaganda campaigns receive local approval, CDE tactics such as its attempt to impose education degree requirements on homeschooling parents, coupled with initiatives like Senator O’Connell’s, could put California’s educational freedom movement on the national radar screen. Though growing, the homeschooling community in California is still small. It could position itself as an oppressed butterfly in search of naught but learning, fighting a bureaucratic tyrant that’s trying to pull off its wings. A giant bureaucracy that picks on a tiny, defenseless underdog group that wants nothing from the state but to be left in peace will find as few supporters as cruelty, tyranny, or cat-battering.
(PS: About this cat-battering thing: If you must, use a bread-crumb batter.)
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