Children of the world unite!
At first I thought the right-wing of the UK blogosphere had erupted into civil war, with prolix blogger Oliver Kamm seemingly taking on teen prodigy Peter Cuthbertson."Children need to indulge in fantasy, and there are great works of children's literature that encourage the exercise of imaginative flights. It is morally wrong to transfer that appetite for fantasy to political activism; it's bad for the children most of all. What you'll end up with is an intellectually impoverished set of haranguers who lack any awareness of how to manage competing claims to scarce resources or reconcile conflicting values. "
But no. In fact I had got entirely the wrong point. Kamm actually was saying that children shouldn't be allowed to take political stances because they can't conceptually understand trade-offs, and this materialises not because they end up crazed-Thatcherites, but because they will be too LEFT-WING.
"We therefore, in politics and economics, make trade-offs. Children don't have the conceptual equipment to grasp this. They want only good things; it would be unnatural if they didn't. Children who imagine that's a political stance, however, ought not to be flattered. They want peace, and don't see that war to overthrow a bellicose tyrant is sometimes preferable. They want forgiveness of Third World debt, and don't see that developing countries' cost of capital would thereby rise and damage the living standards of the poor. They want to protect the Earth, and don't see that global controls on pollution make it harder for the Third World to lift itself out of poverty, or that environmental protection is a preference, to be assessed in terms of its benefits and costs relative to other public goods, and not a moral imperative."
Now aside from the fact that Kamm's tradeoffs are questionable (Does foregivness of third world debt lead to higher interest rates? I can see (although the evidence is mixed) how repudiation of one's debts could increase their future interest rate, but forgiveness?)), is it really the case that children are left-wing? I'd imagine children's political views are less uniform than Kamm thinks, and much less left-wing.
For example, from what I remember of my own schooldays, children seem to be too unquestioning of authority, anti-European, rather too proud of Britain's world achievements, overly symphathetic to the view that success is always earned, that taxes should be lower and that the Royal Family is a Good Thing.
posted by Matthew @ 8/22/2003 12:00:00 PM
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