The radicalism of the 1960s must have come from somewhere. I've read that it was an attempt by the youth movements to hold their parents generation to its own professed standards. As represented by the broadcasts on Radio Free Asia, and other US broadcasts into countries of the Eastern Bloc and the Nonaligned Movement.
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I'm #listening to the latest mix from SSSD (kia ora e hoa!);
https://www.freefm.org.nz/Programmes/Details.aspx?PID=97468cee-0f3c-4451-952a-8d2473baa59e
He drops a sample from a rah-rah post-WW2 film uses the phrase "future citizen's" to describe children in public education. That's some aspirational language. We could use a bit of that.
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Instead of children being an inconvenient liability, a cost that should be shouldered alone by parents, they're future citizens. It's in *our own interests* to make sure they're fed well, educated well, and so on.
Child poverty is a threat to our future citizens, and even if their parents aren't making the best choices, those citizens didn't choose their parents. So why should they bear the cost alone?
Avoidable child poverty is monstrous. Our future citizens deserve better.
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Children should be a collective responsability, on that we are in agreement, but to what extent?
Calling children "future citizens" is a double-edged sword. Instead of helping parents with tax breaks, parental allowances, free services and whatnot, a government could become very aggressive in taking care of children, forcibly taking away children from parent deemed "unfit", placing them in boarding schools, etc.
It's been done before, and not necessarily for good reasons...
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@axnxcamr
> forcibly taking away children from parent deemed "unfit", placing them in boarding schools, etc
Oh I have personal experiences with this. I know how upsetting it is for those involved in a child welfare intervention.
But the fact is, some parents *are* unfit. Sometimes children are killed by their families. Either we just shrug our shoulders and let it happen, or we try to figure out the warning signs and intervene to prevent it. You know, behave like a community.
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But even while intervening a "future citizens" attitude motivates a different approach. One that supports the longer term, all round health of the extended family, and community, as well as the short term physical health of the child(ren).
This produces quite different results from the rule-bound attitude I suspect you're thinking of. Which is prescriptive, unyielding, and blissfully unaware of the cultural biases it's folding into its criteria for intervention.
Strypey
Sylvain