"The Ultimate Nanny State"

Melanie Phillips discusses the latest government intrusion:

"..the babyhood curriculum is not merely absurd and misguided. It is also sinister. For through it, the Government seeks to control an area that should be none of its business.

The aim is to inculcate very young children with politically approved attitudes — so they will show they know the difference between right and wrong and understand that people have different needs, views, cultures and beliefs. This is because, would you believe, by the age of three years and four months, children are to begin citizenship lessons.

Let us pinch ourselves. This is a country which has all but destroyed the essence of true citizenship, the sense of obligation to this country that derives from a knowledge and respect for its institutions and its values.

Instead, it has turned citizenship into a programme to remake not just national identity but to create a new type of human being from whom all politically incorrect views have been removed.
And now this programme of indoctrination is to begin when the citizen' has not yet even blown out the candles on its fourth birthday cake.

Whatever happened to childhood?

It is not that all these requirements laid out in this curriculum are necessarily wrong. On the contrary, many are simply re-statements of the normal milestones of children's healthy development.

What is wrong and alarming is that the State should be imposing them upon children.

It is the deeply disturbing idea of an all-seeing, beneficent state that knows better than parents how a child should develop and even what attitudes it should have, and which therefore seeks to infiltrate itself into every area of children's lives so they become effectively programmed to turn out as little clones of what the State expects them to be.