Why must governments try to manage us so?
And from “cradle to the grave?”
I mean, that’s awfully specific – and without regard to individuality and preferences.
Do all of us need this? Do all of us want this?
Even bigger – why are we (the majority among us) still voting for these people?
I think the answer is simple.
Understand: We crave security, even false ones.
The last point should be obvious. Yes, a thousand times. What the modern west has done to the family unit is an abomination. Shame on us.
One of Eliot’s chief concerns is that the “educationists,” assuming the part of what Lewis called the Controllers, will necessarily diminish the role of the family in education, within which Eliot includes moral formation. “In the society desired by some reformers, what the family can transmit will be limited to the minimum, especially if the child is to be, as Mr. H. C. Dent hopes, manipulated by a unified educational system ‘from the cradle to the grave.’ ”Dent had been since 1940 the editor of the Times Education Supplementand had written one of the most widely read of the many wartime books on education, A New Order in English Education (1942). The phrase “from the cradle to the grave” was associated with the Beveridge Report, also from 1942, which laid the foundation for the postwar creation of the National Health Service and other elements of a comprehensive welfare state, and Dent understood a new national educational scheme as necessarily and intimately related to this larger social program.
-Alan Jacobs, The Year Of Our Lord 1943 (Amazon)
