“We have never invested as much in public education as we should have, because we’ve always had kind of a private notion of children. Your kid is yours, and totally your responsibility. We haven’t had a very collective notion of “these are our children”. So part of it is we have to break through our kind of private idea that kids belong to their parents, or kids belong to their families, and recognize that kids belong to whole communities; once it’s every bodies’ responsibility and not just the households, then we start making better investments.”
Those are the somewhat controversial words of one Melissa Harris-Perry, which she delivered over a between-segments blurb quite some time ago on MSNBC, a rather large news network here in America. The argument over who owns children is, perhaps surprisingly, perhaps not, one that is quite old, storied, and diverse across the many countries of the world. Does the Parent own their children, do their families, or their families’ patriarchs or matriarchs? Do children belong to the community, the local lord, or the state?
Nowadays, these questions flare up in the media and public consciousness in response to situations like these:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g8r-bdcvx8E
the battle between the authority of public schools (the state) and parents is riddled with impassioned caretakers, and arcane terms like in loco parentis and parens patriae – and nobody seems to be right or wrong. The state seems to only want to make sure every bodies’ best interest is looked out for, and the parents seem to be besieged underdogs that are having their basic human rights pulled out from under them. Everyone thinks they know what’s best and nobody wants to admit they’re wrong.
In all the hullabaloo over who owns whom, nobody seems to see that the root of the conversation itself is despicable beyond all reason. It’s an argument over who owns another person and should be allowed to be the absolute power over that person. They’re only children, yes, but that doesn’t make it any less grotesque to treat them like property. Nobody owns children, not their parents or families, or the state or community – they’re their own people, they have their own perspectives, their own wants and motivations, and they make their own decisions.
Children do need caretakers, they’re young, naive, or just ignorant; they don’t understand things the way people who have more experience do (though they’re often less broken individuals, because of it). They do need a person, or persons, who will have their best interests at heart that they can trust to look out for them and make sure they’re okay. Who’s the best qualified and most entitled to that position? I can’t say for sure, though likely the answer’s not anything so clearly cut as “everybody” or “the parent/s”, but the fact is that the fight over that right is a disservice to the very people being fought over.
In most cultures which have indulged in the practice of slavery, the children of a person’s personal slave belong to the slave’s owner, who gets to have them raised as they see fit – for more slavery, typically. That’s just something to consider.
As always, thanks for reading
Mike
Off White 