Alien Children

In the 1974 NFL Draft, the Steelers found Lynn Swann, Jack Lambert, John Stallworth, Mike Webster, and Donnie Shell.
In NFL history, no team ever has added so many Hall of Fame players in a single draft, and the league has been staging its Annual Selection Meeting since 1936.

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Alien Children 

Jessamine Chan’s 2022 novel The School for Good Mothers (New York: Simon & Schuster) constructs a bureaucratic dystopia in which unfit parents are ordered by family courts into a re-education camp run by Child Protective Services.

The U.S. already has a legal apparatus for removing children from their parents. And forced re-education has precedent in the United States. Hundreds of thousands of Indigenous children were forced into “Indian Boarding Schools” between the 1860s and 1960s under the presumption that the state knew what was best for them. The United States already provides resources for in-home training for people whose children might otherwise be taken away. The government is certainly not hostile to judging parents on any level. 

Birthrates are falling but good, capable children who become good, capable adults are the real point. Raising children is hard but for self-indulgent people, it may be impossible. Of course, some are simply too young, too stupid, or too distracted to be good parents and their being around children may be inherently dangerous. More, bad parents may bring bad genes to their children, perhaps the most difficult wall to climb. And children are touchy; they can be damaged early and it sticks.

Children and youth are no longer a subset of the culture, they have become part of a separate culture and parents are only one factor in their separation. Unproductive--perhaps criminal--youth menace the present and threaten the future. Not only are they dead weight and lost talent, they must be supported, perhaps forever. Replacing parents is part of the options and the Left is not averse to high-minded experiments, like the “Indian Boarding Schools,” especially when they get to be in charge.

Would they consider rebuilding an orphanage system?