by David Safier
In Romney's elite Never Never Land, all children are raised by two parent families that can live on one income. That's the only way his solution to early childhood education works, which is, one parent should be home during children's early years — unless, I guess, a single parent is wealthy enough to be able to afford not to work.
Here's Romney's answer to a question posed by NBC's Brian Williams.
"[B]oth in terms of early education and continuing throughout their career having certainly an advantage to have two parents, but even then to have one parent that stays closely involved with the education of the child and can be at home in those early years of education can be extraordinarily important."
Let's take this statement apart.
Romney wants only dedicated parents who "stay closely involved" with their kids, but he doesn't believe in abortion to terminate unwanted pregnancies. And he'd do what he could to make contraception more difficult to obtain.
Romney wants a parent to stay home with his/her young child, but he thinks people on welfare are shirkers, whiners and victims. I'm not sure how he thinks a single parent without a trust fund is supposed to stay home without government assistance. I guess parent and child can live on love alone.
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I was home-schooled from preschool through sixth grade by my mother. We were by no means wealthy, but we did not contribute to New Jersey preschools.
But of course, rich kids like Romney’s many grandkids get the kind of enriched (pun sort of intended) that most kids who are poor or even just middle class (with two working parents) and even some yuppie parents can’t provide. As an education expert, David, you know the data: just things like the number of different vocabulary words poor and upper-middle and upper class kids hear every day. Early childhood education is probably the best investment we can make as a society. Of course many European countries know this and have made it part of policy for decades. That’s why my undergraduates who are international students from countries like Iceland, Germany, Austria, Norway and France just roll their eyes, not at their classroom peers, but in telling me how ignorant and poorly skilled Americans in general are. (The Europeans are particularly mocking of Americans’ general ignorance of the rest of the world — the Austrian student constantly had to tell people Austria is not Australia — and how the government doesn’t do anything to ameliorate the problems of the poorest among us.)
Just to clarify, Pamela is referring to the infamous media personality Dr. Laura Schlessinger, not Tucson’s own beloved Dr. Laura Elias Dela Torre, who is a much kinder, thoughtful and more wonderful “Dr. Laura.”
That is Dr. Laura’s stance; one parent should stay home– even if the other parent has to work 2 jobs.