posted
I thought this bit was interesting for those who keep calling OSC a rightie:
quote: Who are these “all” whose good we will be sustaining? If we feel ourselves not to belong to that group, then we are no longer part of the civilization; and when most members of a civilization feel no stake in its preservation, it will not survive.
Another way we are destroying ourselves is by “credentialing” our students instead of educating them. Everyone these days blames our bad educational system on something or someone, but few people bother to point out precisely how it is bad and why it hurts our civilization as a whole.
posted
Interesting, at least. Still, I don't see comrade Card suggesting any specific solutions. "Restoring trust in public institutions" is no doubt a fine thing, but how?
As for the nuclear family, the horse is dead - time to stop beating the poor thing. Consider Scandinavia, even richer and more self-indulgent than America, and with a much more relaxed attitude towards sex, having no religious right to speak of. The rates of teen births are among the lowest in the developed world (for example, births per 1000 women age 15-19 in Norway in 1998 : 12.1, USA : 52.1) and few teenage mothers drop out of school. (Incidentally, the last has more to do with a welfare system than social attitudes, although there's no stigma to having a child early). And, of course, no drive-by shootings. Incidentally, a slightly higher percentage of Norwegian women have their sexual debut before the age of twenty than is the case in the US, though the difference is not overwhelming.
I suggest, then, that insisting on the nuclear family is not the way to go : It won't work, and in today's climate you might as well try to hold back the sea with a Presidential mandate. Education, and a real welfare system to catch the accidents, is the way to go.
The statistics I used are in this UNICEF report, which actually makes quite interesting reading in its own right. Note that they are from 1998, so the numbers might have changed a bit by now.
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