Meetings
the Week of October 24, 2016
Monday 10/24/16
Bershire
Wind Sterling 10:30 am
Scout
Hall PCS Town Hall* 5:30 pm
BOS PCS Town Hall* 6:30 pm
Tuesday 10/25/16
Town
Clerk PCS Town Hall* 1:30 pm
Cap.
Planning PCS Town Hall* 6:30 pm
Planning PCS Town Hall* 6:30 pm
Wednesday 10/26/16
Economic
PCS Town Hall* 9:00 am
* Pauly Cosentino Sr. Town
Hall
Something to think about concerning schooling our children.
ReplyDelete79.The Parens Patriae Powers: The Underground History of American Education by John Taylor Gatto from archive.org
The Parens Patriae Powers
The 1852 compulsory schooling legislation of Massachusetts represents a fundamental change in the jurisprudence of parental authority, as had the adoption act passed by the nearly identically constituted legislature just four years prior, the first formal adoption legislation anywhere on earth since the days of the Roman Empire. Acts so radical could not have passed silently into practice if fundamental changes in the status of husbands and wives, parents and children, had not already gravely damaged the prestige of the family unit.
There are clear signs as far back as 1796 that elements in the new American state intended to interpose themselves in corners of the family where no European state had ever gone before. In that year, the Connecticut Superior Court, representing the purest Puritan lineage of original New England, introduced "judicial discretion" into the common law of child custody and a new conception of youthful welfare hardly seen before outside the pages of philosophy books — the notion that each child had an individual destiny, a private "welfare" independent of what happened to the rest of its family.
A concept called "psychological parenthood" began to take shape, a radical notion without legal precedent that would be used down the road to support drastic forcible intervention into family life. It became one of the basic justifications offered during the period of mass immigration for a compulsion law intended to put children under the thrall of so-called scientific parenting in schools.
Judicial discretion in custody cases was the first salvo in a barrage of poorly understood court rulings in which American courts made law rather than interpreted it. These rulings were formalized later by elected legislatures. Rubber-stamping the fait accompli, they marked a restructuring of the framework of the family ordered by a judicial body without any public debate or consent. No precedent for such aggressive court action existed in English law. The concept lived only in the dreams and speculations of Utopian writers and philosophers.
ReplyDeleteThe 1840 case Mercein v. People produced a stunning opinion by Connecticut's Justice Paige — a strain of radical strong-state faith straight out of Hegel:
The moment a child is born it owes allegiance to the government of the country of its birth, and is entitled to the protection of the government.
As the opinion unrolled, Paige further explained "with the coming of civil society the father's sovereign power passed to the chief or government of the nation." A part of this power was then transferred back to both parents for the convenience of the State. But their guardianship was limited to the legal duty of maintenance and education, while absolute sovereignty remained with the State.
Not since John Cotton, teacher of the Boston church in the early Puritan period, had such a position been publicly asserted. Cotton, in renouncing Roger Williams, insisted on the absolute authority of magistrates in civil and religious affairs, the quintessential Anglican
position. In later life he even came to uphold the power of judges over conscience and was willing to grant powers of life and death to authorities to bring about conformity. Thus did the Puritan rebellion rot from within.
ReplyDeleteA few years after the Paige ruling, American courts received a second radical authorization to intervene in family matters, "the best interest of the child" test. In 1847, Judge Oakley of New York City Superior Court staked a claim that such power "is not unregulated or arbitrary" but is "governed, as far as the case will admit, by fixed rules and principles." When such fixed rules and principles were not to be found, it caused no problem either, for it was only another matter subject to court discretion.
In the fifty- four- year period separating the Massachusetts compulsion school law/adoption law and the founding of Children's Court at the beginning of the twentieth century in Chicago, the meaning of these decisions became increasingly clear. With opposition from the family-centered societies of the tidewater and hill-country South diminished by civil war, the American state assumed the parens patriae powers of old- time absolute kings, the notion of the political state as the primary father. And there were signs it intended to use those powers to synthesize the type of scientific family it wanted, for the society it wanted. To usher in the future it wanted.
The Plan Advances
Here's the take away: If our children legally belong to the State why are they not paying for their education?
ReplyDeleteJump to: Past Meetings/Minutes
ReplyDeleteBerkshire Wind Power Cooperative Corporation
For Town: Templeton, MA
Name: Berkshire Wind Power Cooperative Corporation
Chair: John Driscoll
Clerk: (see Members, below)
Members: not entered yet
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Past Meetings
Time Location Minutes Other Documents
Oct 24, 2016
10:30 AM EDT Sterling Municipal Light Department, 50 Main St., Sterling, MA 01564 Not Available Documents Available Details and Agenda...
Mar 11, 2015
10 AM EDT Wakefield Municipal Gas & Light Department
Not Available Documents Available Details and Agenda...
Aug 20, 2014
11 AM EDT Wakefield Municipal Gas & Light Department
Not Available Documents Available Details and Agenda...
Ever wonder how why documents are not available or not posted in time frame required
ReplyDeleteAre these meeting of combined co ops only shell games for the rich who invested in the bonds that have not income or tax liability on the interest earned.
This is a rich get richer and we pay a higher price for the power these agreements produce. Like with the nuclear deals we have will we veer get the return power reduced prices or will the TMLWP gobble up what they can and or give away how the commission feels fit.