Recently, controversy has been stirred up regarding an MSNBC commercial starring weekend host Melissa Harris-Perry.

The commercial started a national debate concerning whose responsibility children are. Are they the parents’ and families’ responsibility or the community and collectives responsibility?

I will let her words speak for themselves:

“We have never invested as much in public education as we should have because we’ve always had kind of a private notion of children: Your kid is yours and totally your responsibility.

“We haven’t had a very collective notion of these are our children. So part of it is we have to break through our kind of private idea that kids belong to their parents, or kids belong to their families, and recognize that kids belong to whole communities. Once it’s everybody’s responsibility, and not just the household’s, then we start making better investments,” Harris-Perry said.

When I first watched the promo in question, I was flabbergasted to say the least. It is far too reminiscent of Huxley’s Brave New World.

To be fair, on her April 13 show, Harris-Perry responded to the controversy, stating that she believes that “families have first and primary responsibility for their children.”

She also addresses the question of whether or not children “belong” to anyone. Yet, after seeming to say that actually children are their own person, she continues to talk about who they belong to.

It is not surprising that someone such as Harris-Perry is in favor of more public school funding and public school in general.

The public school system is little more than a system to indoctrinate children to be good little citizens.

Every morning starts off with a cult-like chanting of the pledge allegiance to an inanimate object.

First graders have no idea what they are saying when they say the pledge of allegiance. Children are taught to revere government officials such as Abraham Lincoln without being exposed to both sides of that person’s history.

(I suspect your second grade teacher didn’t tell you that among a great number of things good old honest Abe once issued an arrest warrant for the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court who disagreed with him. Look it up.)

Stand in line. Don’t question authority. Be a good citizen. Uphold one’s civic duty. These are the values instilled in children in public school.

Free thinking is destroyed in the early years of school. It is instead replaced with a collective duty.

I do not believe in public education. I think it is foolish, stupid and outright criminal. And here Harris-Perry is saying that the government extort more money from me to increase funding to an institution I do not believe in.

Not only am I being forced to pay for something I do not believe in, but I am told that children are “the community’s” responsibility. As someone who does not particularly plan on having children, in part because I would take such a responsibility very seriously, I certainly do not want to be responsible for everyone else’s children.

I have never signed nor agreed to this amorphous social contract that binds me to “the community,” whatever that is.

I never agreed to be in any way responsible for random people’s children, and I most certainly never agreed to pay for other people’s children to be indoctrinated by the state.