10-17-2016, 12:23 PM
(10-17-2016, 11:11 AM)The Wonkette Wrote: I am bothered by the claims that "day care" is bad for children. My daughter thrived in day care. It exposed her to other children and it made the time that I spent with her special. I can say the same regarding all of my nieces and nephews, now all grown, who are successful adults, most in good stable relationships (the exception is my 24-year-old nephew, who is still in the process of "adulting".
As with schooling, good day care can do wonders. But if it should be inadequate it can do great harm. We still under-spend on education for the kids who need it the most (the poor) or have such nightmarish institutions as the Detroit Independent School District that gets huge amounts of money, spends it recklessly, and gets a poor result due to corruption. Liquor on the expense account of school administrators? Seminars on educational techniques in Hawaii? Really!
The single mother collecting welfare (yes, this is a stereotype, but there are people who fit this pattern, and I know some people who fit the stereotype) who vegetates in front of an idiot screen while getting fat on junk food with little more to offer her children is far worse than what daycare has to offer. She might as well get a job in retail, domestic service, sweatshop manufacturing, or farm labor, and have her kids get some organized play and a little learning in day care. At least she will have a little more money to spend on hair-dressing and clothes... better this than exposing her kids to reality television in which a man calls his wife a slut and throws a chair at her boyfriend.
You didn't expect her to watch reruns of Downton Abbey, did you? Or have her kids listening to Beethoven's piano sonatas, did you? If her ideal is to expose her kids to life-enriching experiences she can do so more effectively in three hours in the evening than my stereotype can do in twelve. If she wants to expose kids to great art, music, and drama, maybe she should be a teacher.
(We really need to go to the 6-hour workday because about two hours of the 8-hour workday are typically wasted on office politics).
The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated Communist but instead the people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists -- Hannah Arendt.