Editor’s note: Michael Ackley’s columns contain satire and parody based on current events, and thus mix fact with fiction. He assumes informed readers will be able to tell which is which.
Californians likely have been puzzled by a series of slick television commercials touting preschool – not any particular preschool, just preschool in general.
Kids who attend preschool are better adjusted socially, the ads say: They are better prepared academically. They are all-around better off than children who stay home until kindergarten.
The advertisements are from First 5 California, which sounds like a bank or mortgage brokerage but in fact is an arm of state government. It parcels out money from tobacco tax funds – quite a lot of money – to “local programs that serve children from birth to age 5 and their families to improve child health and child development, family functioning and systems of care.”
That’s from SRI International, one of the outfits hired to evaluate First 5 programs.
Anybody want to bet this wasn’t the product of a bureaucratic brainstorming session based on the question, “Now that we have all this money, what are we going to do with it?”
Anybody want to bet this doesn’t reflect the bureaucratic belief that government can do a better job raising children than families can? Or that the sooner the state can get kids out of their homes and into institutional settings, the better?
It’s something to consider the next time a politician advocates a sin tax “for the good of the children” without specifying exactly how the funds would be spent.
SRI International says among its tasks will be reporting “to the public, the governor, the legislature, state and local policy-makers, and opinion leaders how the program is making a difference in the lives of California’s children and their families.”
Anybody want to bet the reports won’t be propaganda for the statist viewpoint?
I don’t pay any tobacco taxes, but I want my money back, nonetheless.
Meanwhile, back on campus: According to the Chronicle of Higher Education, professors across the nation are distressed about a couple of congressional measures they fear would limit academic freedom.
HR 3077 would create an advisory board to keep an eye on certain programs funded under Title VI of the Higher Education Act. This means the board would monitor “foreign-language” and “area-studies” programs – basically, international relations programs.
It seems the legislature has heard rumors such programs frequently exhibit an anti-American bias that makes it tough for the State Department and other agencies to recruit bright college graduates.
Academia is aghast and denies there is such bias. While it is at it, academia might as well deny there is an anti-capitalism bias, a pro-socialism bias, an anti-classical bias and an anti-achievement bias.
This would be as effective as denying that our planetary system is heliocentric or that the Boston Red Sox are cursed. People will believe what they see, and eventually legislators will react.
The bill may or may not be a threat to academic freedom, but concerned professors just might consider the idea that it’s a reaction to the intellectual monoculture they have cultivated for the last three decades.
It’s Monday and – if we guess right – the demonstrations conducted by those favoring the return of the Iraq’s Baath Party are all over, but the bail hearings, the litter cleanup and the protestations that those engaged in vandalism didn’t represent the vast majority of “peace” marchers.
The best that can be said for the San Francisco war protest was the organizers didn’t trot out Rep. John Conyers and the unspeakable Al Sharpton. That pair will be the pride of the demonstration in Washington, D.C.
WATCH: A day after another near-assassination, President Trump goes live on X Spaces
WND Staff