Around The MOB: Downing World
By Mitch Berg
Our next stop on our tour around the Minnesota Organization of Bloggers is Downing World.
One of the fun things about the MOB is realizing that there’s this huge undercurrent of smart, motivated, boundlessly interesting people out there, all over the place. And you never know when you’re going to smack into one of them.
If only rhetorically.
David Downing lives in Saint Paul, has a diverse bunch of interests, and has been blogging pretty steadily for almost six years now.
Given my interest in schools, this post caught my attention:
Orphanages, though, are passe. They’re considered old-fashioned. Inhumane. Draconian. Mckenzie writes:
When Newt Gingrich suggested in 1994 that many welfare kids would be better off in orphanages, Hillary Clinton declared the proposal “unbelievable and absurd.” Conventional child-welfare wisdom hasn’t changed much since.
Families — blood or foster — should raise children, the modern, progressive, liberal mindset says. Not government. Not institutions.
They conveniently ignore the 800-lb. irony in the room. I’m surprised that I hadn’t caught it until now.
The same modern, progressive, liberal types who find institutional child-rearing so offensive tend to be the same people who want the public schools to take over more and more of what used to be the responsibilities of parents. After all, the government and professional educators know best. They’ll feed the kids breakfast. Teach them about sex and drugs. Teach them values (whose, exactly?). Provide after-school care. Provide summer programs. They want the schools to take over as many parental responsibilities as possible, even when kids have parents!
So, they hold both of these ideas at the same time: 1) An institution called an orphanage couldn’t possibly raise children as well as substitute parents. 2) An institution called a public school can raise children better than their actual parents.
Read the whole thing (from mid-January).
Downing cranks out something a couple of times a week, and everything I saw looked like good stuff.
Check out a new MOB blog every day. I mean, I am, so why not?
February 3rd, 2010 at 12:54 am
David Downing is a paleoblogger, he was blogging before there was such a thing as blogging. The only downside to this is that there isn’t an RSS feed for his site/blog.
Dave has been mentioned in all sorts of interesting places, such as Joe Soucheray’s column in the Pioneer-Press, James Taranto’s Best of the Web, and the keepers of the banished words lists at Lake Superior State University. He is one of the buried treasures of the MOB, hard to find, but worth it once one does.