Sheer Delusion: HHS Launches National “Shut Up and Sit Down” School Campaign

If I had to pick one major difference between conservatives and progressives, it would be that conservatives choose to deal with the world as it is while progressives believe they can alter the unalterable until it matches their view of what the world should be.

You will not find a better illustration of this difference than this story of our HHS Secretary grand plan to change the essential natures of small children.

Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius told CNSNews.com on Wednesday that the administration’s new $500 million early learning initiative is designed to deal with children from birth onward to prevent such problems as 5-year olds who “can’t sit still” in a kindergarten classroom.

“You really need to look at the range of issues, because if a 5-year-old can’t sit still, it is unlikely that they can do well in a kindergarten class, and it has to be the whole range of issues that go into healthy child development,” Sebelius said during a telephone news conference on Wednesday to announce the Race to the Top Early Learning Challenge.

Right. So all you readers out there who were perfectly normal 5-year-old children who couldn’t sit still for a whole school day (and that would be every single one of you) didn’t have “healthy child development”. You didn’t “do well in a kindergarten class”, which means that you are…well, who knows what Kathleen Sibelius thinks of you? Obviously, she thinks you’re flawed because your development didn’t involve the knowledge from her ginormous brain and half a billion dollars of taxpayer money.

The telling word in the story is “problems”. To Sibelius and her fellow progressives, it’s a problem if 5-year-old children act like 5-year-old children. And in classic progressive fashion, her answer is not to alter our educational system to account for this but to “solve” the “problem” with an expansive and expensive government program to reprogram small children so they all act the way Kathleen Sibelius believes they should.

Or, as Rob Long puts it:

Liberals think that if they spend enough money, or fine tune the right social program, they can teach five year-olds how to sit still.  And conservatives know that no amount of money or social engineering or child counseling will ever be able to make a five year-old sit still.

We know this is folly, which is why we must pry their greedy and delusional hands from the levers of government power every chance we get. If we can’t manage it, we’re going to get more of these lunatic experiments and both we and our children will suffer.

Here’s one last thing to ponder. How much of this $500 million will go toward actually educating children and how much will go into salaries for brand-new school administrators, high-dollar outside consultants, and more cash into the coffers of teachers’ unions?

Tags: Education, Nanny Fascism, Progressives