I HATE that nagging child in the NH Electric Co-op commercial - Granite Grok

I HATE that nagging child in the NH Electric Co-op commercial

One of the most annoying commercials I see on TV is one put up by the NH Electric Co-op where this twerp of a tweener is hectoring her parents to "save the planet" by cutting down on their energy use.  Stock the fridge full, Dad.  Shut off the lights, Mom!  Let the dishes air dry; yada, yada, yada.  I looked – I guess they don’t DARE put those commercials out on the web.

I’ll tell you straight up – every time I see one of those sappy commercials, I want to just slap that kid for impertinence. Respect for her parents?  The recognition that they just might know more than she does (after all, who is paying the energy bills in that house – her)? Then I want to slap those parents for letting that kid lead them around by their noses.  Respect?  Deference?  Recognition that the sponsors of these commercials think that parents are dolts?  Out the window, in trying to sell their point of view, is that there are real, good reasons why parents are the parents and not just the fact that they were born long before this irritating nag of a girl was even a gleam in someone’s eye.

My biggest peeve?  Once again, the parents are shown as being clueless.  Hey, without this smarta** daughter telling her parents how to live their lives, where would Mom and Dad be?  After all, kids know best, even with an incomplete education and a short time on earth!

And what’s so wrong with ridiculing the role of parents after all, Skip?  Kids DO know best, right?

Well, there are those that Do believe that teaching kids that they are better than their parents is the way to change society. There is a movement afoot to use our kids to implement their aims for society – and it starts in school.  The value of the parents – meh!  It is OUR ideology that we want to embed into your kids.  This post over at Joane Jacobs got me started:

Environmental educators want children to use “pester power” to socialize their parents, writes Frank Furedi on Pajamas Media.  Children can “be the teachers and tell their parents what to do for a change,” boasts Andrew Sutter of Britain’s Eco-Schools. Oh happy day.

Now, I’m not saying that parents should not listen to their kids – not at all. What I am saying that when others decide to use MY kids to further THEIR agenda, I get a little ticked – and so should you!  I followed that "pester power" link:

Over at Pajamas Media:

 

Educators sometimes give the impression that they are in the business of protecting their pupils from the negative influence of their parents. Schools are sometimes devoted to the project of correcting the “outdated values” that parents have taught their children.

 

I’ve seen it.  I’ve heard it.  And then Educators just don’t seem to understand that when parents "get" the message that they are the problem, they get outraged.  The solution?  Homeschooling, charter schools, and private schools – all out of the reach of these people who believe that the kids are theirs and that the parents should be irrelevant.

 

That’s bad enough! However, in recent times policymakers and educators have also embraced the idea that through influencing children they can reeducate parents. Instead of parents socializing their children they advocate a reversal in roles.

 

…This casual reference to the transference of experience of child to parent illustrates the normalization of the practice of socialization in reverse. In the U.S., socializing children through the promotion of environmental education has been practiced in schools for over a decade. The New York Times reports that a new cohort of “eco-kids” devoted to green values “try to hold their parents accountable at home” and adds how adults become defensive under the “watchful eye of the pint-size eco-police.” School districts across the U.S. have sought to capitalize on the idealism of “eco-kids” to integrate environmental values into whatever subjects they can.

Politicians and governments have embraced environmental education as a potentially effective instrument for influencing and managing the behavior of the public. In England one Labor MP, Malcolm Wicks, argues that environmental values “can act as vivid teaching aids in science lessons, civics lessons, geography lessons,” and through absorbing these lessons “children will then begin to educate the parents.” He adds that “in this way we can start to shift behavior.”

Once again, the problem of an intrusive government.  Government exists to protect my freedoms – not to indoctrinate me by first indoctrinating my children against me.  I really hate to have to say it, but this is similar to other totalitarian (think Nazis, Soviets, and Chinese) States that have pursued this approach.

And we allow the same of our democratic government?  Where is it written that one of the approved roles of government is for this to happen?

A report entitled The Role of Schools in Shaping Energy-Related Consumer Behavior is devoted to elaborating a policy framework as to how this objective of promoting educational initiatives can impact parental behavior. One such initiative which involves 5,500 schools is called the Eco-Schools Scheme. Andrew Sutter, who runs Eco-Schools, believes that it provides an opportunity for children “to be the teachers and tell their parents what to do for a change.”

So, what’s part of the solution?  Take back the schools by demanding answers from your School Boards, from the District Superindentants and administrators, and teachers, as to what the actual curriculum.  In this respect (and for Conservatism in general), I certainly agree with Warner Todd Huston (although he was talking more of politics and philosophy in general):

The generally un-American state of education, of course, is our fault. We’ve allowed the enemy to take over the nurturing and teaching of our very own children to be sure. We have routinely and willingly handed our future over to those that want to material hurt our cherished way of life. We have seen the enemy to our way of life thrive, our very Americanness to be threatened, by the hateful leftism that we have allowed to flourish in our schools.

Without a doubt we absolutely cannot win this political battle until we begin to teach our children why it is that conservatism is the true American ideal. It is swimming upstream to take adults and try to convince them that we are right when they’ve been taught that everything American is bad, wrong headed, and evil since childhood.

So I suggest the efforts to turn around the law as an example of how to get it back to where it should be. Let’s replicate in our schools the efforts made in the area of American jurisprudence. We can talk until we are red in the face and blue in the ballot box but we won’t make much headway until we take back our schools. 

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