Public Education Danger to Family

The new education’s danger to the family comes in two stages.  The first stage weakens the family by “atomizing” its members — an effect that is reinforced by popular culture.  As the family flounders, the second stage capitalizes on its failures.  Because the family has been undermined, individual families become disabled — there are some functions they can no longer perform at all, and others they can’t perform fully or well.  At the personal level, families struggle, and often fail, against the forces that weaken and divide them.  Problems increase in number and severity.  At some point, state bureaucracies, typically led by education and social welfare, step in — first to oversee, then to take over, the functions that families are unable to exercise, or are willing to abandon.

When this process runs its course, the influence of the family will be mostly displaced by the influence of the collective, in the form of the bureaucracy, the schools, and the media.  The natural, biological family in general, and parents in particular, will become appendages of the “omnicompetent state,” watchfully regulated by state agencies.  The family will be redefined to prevent it from becoming a focus for loyalties apart from the collective.  If a form of the “family” survives at all, it will be as a convenient device for bureaucratic book-keeping, and will be redefined in mostly economic terms.

Brooks Alexander, “Abolished Man: From Instruction to Indoctrination in the New Education,”  SCP Journal, Vol 16:4, p.7