Hey, Shorten! Leave those kids alone

Conclusion

Ken Kessey's classic novel One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest documented the tyranny of institutionalized life. Whether the institution is formal or informal is often irrelevant, as social norms can sabotage individuality just as much as the diktats of a ruling council. Over the years, children have been consistently habituated into institutional life, at progressively younger and younger ages. They have been denied a sense of individuality, denied an experience of the fundamental solitude that is part of the human condition, and taught to obey, conform, do what they're told, trust their rulers, not rock the boat, socially adjust, solve their problems through social politics and/or appeals to authority, define their sense of self by reference to the group and other people, to prioritize the safe and familiar, to put the feelings of themselves and others above facts, and so forth.

Is it any surprise we now see a collectivist culture of victimhood, where competing claims of suffering and competing mobs of shrieking neurotics define the social landscape?

Children don't need any more schooling, any more institutionalisation, any more of the suffocating control they are under. Children need to be free, both from their elders and their peers, in order to develop a proper sense of an "I" that pre-exists any "we" or "us." Of course children shouldn't be placed into situations of genuine danger, nor should their suffering be discounted, but today's helicopter parents have gone well beyond ensuring safety. Even if child-beating is no longer considered acceptable, schools and parents have merely wrapped the iron fist in a velvet glove and are squeezing tighter and tighter with every passing moment. In a world of Facebook and Twitter, the savagery of the schoolyard is harder to escape than ever before, and Bill Shorten wants to throw children in at an even younger age!

Adults who want liberty need to realise that habituating children to tyranny guarantees the destruction of freedom. Shorten's plan to put our kids in the clutches of Nurse Ratched from the tender age of three (!) is not only a make-work program for Labor-voting unionised government employees, it is another step down the road to serfdom.