OPINION
Tani Newton
Let’s get this straight: Family First is a wonderful organisation and I’m deeply thankful that it exists. Without it, New Zealand would be in a far worse plight than it is. I’ve supported it over many years, and I regularly pray for the organisation and for Bob McCoskrie, who is a stalwart, tireless, seemingly incorruptible voice of reason and champion of wholesomeness.
Nevertheless, in what I hope is a friendly spirit, I feel compelled to offer a spirited rejoinder to Family First’s endorsement of the new Government’s intention to “address truancy” and “[e]nforce compulsory education”.
How on earth they plan to do that is a good question to begin with.
Regular truancy is currently running at 53% of enrolled school pupils. Are the police going to track down all of these children and youth, overpower them, and drag them into class? And then make sure that they stay there all day? We’re talking over 160,000 children here; there are fewer than 11,000 police. The previous government appointed 82 new truancy officers at the beginning of the year, but that is a mere drop in a bucket. The schools can’t do anything to these stragglers either: there is nothing they could punish them with that would be worse than being in school.
But this isn’t really the point. The law doesn’t penalise children for not going to school. It penalises parents for not making them go. And, in case anyone has forgotten, for sixteen years it has been illegal in this country to make your children do things they don’t want to do. Never mind all that talk about an “anti-smacking law”. That’s smoke and mirrors. The revised Section 59 of the Crimes Act doesn’t illegalise “smacking”. It illegalises using force for the purpose of correction. And in the real world, where you and I live, that means that, in the final analysis, it’s illegal to force your children to go to school.
It’s also illegal not to force them to go to school. How on earth can this be “enforced”? Even if all those thousands of parents could somehow be prosecuted, what could the courts reasonably tell them? “You should have just brought your children up better”? How?
On a side note, this does not concern everyone equally. The Education Review Office notes that “the drop has been steepest in low-decile schools”, and the independent (non-state-integrated) schools contacted by your intrepid reporter had not been overwhelmed by the problem. So this may not be so much about families who want their children to go to school, and who are prepared to pay money for quality. This is really about the mass of people who were historically herded into schools by state force, with the complicity of society. Now, as society becomes more and more fragmented, as people become more and more disaffected, disengaged and disillusioned, it appears that the fragile social complexities that were holding that together aren’t really there any more.
Society is falling apart because the family is falling apart. Compulsory state schooling is one of the drivers of that, because it strikes at the very heart of parental authority.
“Free education for all children in public schools” is one of the essential goals set out in the Communist Manifesto – most of which have been partly or fully realised throughout the supposedly capitalist West. This is Fabian socialism, the imposition of communism by stealth and by degrees. The traditional family is the training ground of virtue and uprightness, and the fountainhead of property ownership, inheritance rights, the accumulation of capital, freedom, prosperity, independence, individuality and initiative – all of the things that communism must destroy if it is to usher in its imaginary communitarian utopia. It is not enough for communism to attack private property and personal responsibility. It must wage war on marriage, patriarchy, and parental authority, which are the foundations of those things.
Thus socialism saws off the branch it sits on, because when the family is destroyed, the whole of society is destroyed. The branch is creaking underneath us as we speak. And most conservatives, Christians and traditionalists in general have still not really grasped what is going on. In our love affair with socialism and the rosy promises it holds out, we have failed to see the saw cutting off the branch.