Bruce Bisset: No thoughts for non voting kids

Seems to me the longer National cling to power, the more schizophrenic they become. Because their policies reek of a mix of Labour, Act and United in blue drag.
Take the way they're dismantling an excellent pre-school set-up. Not content with diluting the quality of early childhood teachers and bashing the lower-paid who've come to rely on 20 hours free ECE, the Government now plans to drastically cut funding for in-home education.
Numerous studies show most pre-schoolers learn best in the home environment and, if you can't do it yourself, having your child be part of a small group (maximum of four at one time) in a trained caregiver's home is the best alternative.
Of course there's a place for large-group learning (kindergartens), especially for social interaction skills, but the reason in-home education has blossomed recently is primarily because it works.
Besides, kindergartens don't take under-3s, and community childcare set-ups are scarce and of variable quality. If you must work, private in-home schemes are your only real choice - unless you can afford a nanny.
More to the point perhaps, they allow more women (and some men) to become active workers when otherwise they could not. Surely a step towards a growth economy?
Slashing funding will directly hurt the providers of that service - like Hawke's Bay's own Porse network, for now a successful nation-wide company.
The first impact is that standards will drop, educator training will become minimal, resources will dry up. Some less-efficient outfits will go to the wall - along with all the carers on their books. At which point, children and families will themselves be hurting.
Why do this? There are two possible reasons. The first is Act/United in drag: mothers belong at home, looking after the kids.
That's the so-called Christian rationale and it has quite a following. But it's wildly out-of-step with modern realities.
The second is Labour in drag: children should only be educated within the state system. That's the strict socialist model, still flavour of the century with the bureaucracy. But it denies individual freedom of choice and viable alternatives.
Hence the question: why would the National Party, supposedly libertarian-leaning and champions of free-market economics, deny liberty and curtail the labour force? Inconceivable.
Ditto for the national standards debate. These so-called standards for primary schools were dumped on educators with no consultation, and despite a significant number of schools saying they don't want a bar of them - because they won't work - smiling John Key has his doberman Education Minister forcing schools to comply via naked threats.
Do it or we dissolve your board and put you under statutory management. No ifs, buts or maybes.
No shred of proof, either, that this un-tested regime will in any way improve the general educational levels of the children it's being foisted on. Indeed, considerable professional opinion suggests the reverse.
Moreover special character schools - such as Taikura Rudolf Steiner in Hastings, a school whose record of excellence most would envy - find themselves being compelled to adopt age-group tests completely at odds with their philosophy of learning.
Do it or we de-integrate you and cut funding at the knees, says Anne Tolley. Nice.
It's no surprise the Ministry of Education promotes this socialist approach. Despite a recent "softening" to the contrary, MoE is still full of hard-core by-the-book bureaucrats who believe fundamentally that they know best.
But for National to not only be swayed to implement their regressive thinking but apply it in such fascist fashion beggars belief. Schizophrenic is barely strong enough.
Teachers, like all folk in care-based occupations, can only bring themselves to protest so far. Because it goes against the grain to cross the line that starts to hurt the ones they're charged with educating.
In this case, perhaps that line must be crossed - for the greater good.
However teachers at least have unions and professional bodies to speak and fight for them. The educators at the bottom - early childhood in-home carers - have none.
They will simply be driven out of business. And no one in government, apparently, gives a toss. For them or the children in their care. Even when the first three years of life are the most important for learning development. But children can't vote, can they. That's the right of it.
Bruce Bisset is a freelance writer and poet.