The Nanny State is now inviting itself into the dealings of what should be happening at the individual and community levels.
November 20, 2023
By: Bobby Casey, Managing Director GWP
Technology was meant to make life easier, but it did more than that. Somewhere along the line people lost the thread to the knowledge behind the innovation; the analogue to the digital.
This happened to such a degree all that novelty is now regarded as an entitlement rather than an achievement.
Healthcare is a “human right”. Education is a “human right”. Housing is a “human right”. Net Neutrality is trying to make the internet a “public utility”. People are suggesting the compensation for a 40 hour work week should amount to a one-bedroom apartment, utilities, and food, or a “living wage”.
The general conversation isn’t around access, affordability, and choice, but rather dependency. That dependency begot a political culture that caters to it for votes.
Society has turned into adolescents who want a benefactor, but don’t want to be told what to do. The strings attached to being a dependent is, you really don’t have a say over how the resources are used nor the quality of what those resources buy.
That’s the thing about central planning. People want universal healthcare, but they don’t want mandates and restrictions. People want universal education, but they want to control what their kids are taught. People want a living wage, but don’t want to learn the skills or adopt the ethic that would warrant that level of compensation.
Gavin Newsom is popping up in headlines here and there, which has some folks wondering if he’s Joe Biden’s understudy should Biden putter out before election day in 2024.
In October, Gavin Newsom made a trip to China, to foster an open dialogue with the China on Climate Change. More recently, he hosted Xi Jinping in San Francisco.
One could overlook a warm welcome to the Chinese dictator, but what caught everyone’s attention was the ruthless efficiency in which he cleaned up the city for that visit. San Francisco has been deteriorating from its former glory for years both under his reign as a mayor and even more so with his as governor of California. He idly sat by, claiming there wasn’t any more money or resources to fix up the cities precipitously falling into disrepair.
Then he pulls this conspicuous rabbit out of his hat! All the homeless were relocated. The excrement washed away. The needles disposed of. The graffiti washed away. All in a matter of days in preparation for Xi Jinping’s visit.
Clearly, Newsom has a fondness for the Chinese way, specifically their data tracking and monitoring systems.
California is adopting what is called a “Cradle-to-Career” data system. “Cradle to Grave” is a political pejorative used to describe the expansion of the welfare state. It was meant to disparage the dependency and the outlay of tax dollars for things people should be working for.
Now it’s heralded as the next evolutionary step in education! They didn’t even bother renaming it to avoid the negative implications.
What is this program? According to the CA.gov site:
The California Cradle-to-Career Data System connects individuals and organizations with trusted information and resources, providing insights into critical milestones in the pipeline from early care to K–12 to higher education, skills training, and employment.
It integrates over one billion data points over two hundred categories with the ostensible goal of ushering people into career success. All these data points existed independent of one another and they are just weaving it together to culminate into what could be individualized guidance for future students and mitigate the skill gaps as well as drop out rates.
If you search this online, you will find more word salad than substance. Here’s another description:
Guided by a commitment to long-term, large-scale change in an entire community, cradle-to-career systems bring residents, school staff, community leaders, and service providers together to focus their collective efforts on addressing pivotal areas of a child’s development: early learning and development, elementary benchmarks, successful transition to middle school and high school, on-time high school graduation, and successful enrollment and matriculation from postsecondary education and career tracks.
The interesting part of this is, the examples given are a non-profit, a school district, and a single school doing community work, connecting parents, students and school faculty to help children. That’s what most people expect schools to be doing in the first place, so this shouldn’t be revolutionary.
This is what many private models do. This is what homeschoolers do.
What isn’t prescribed is the goals, metrics, and strategies. Nothing is entailed in this program, although some examples could illustrate what might be implied.
So the ambition is to help children. But for now, all we know of California’s program is the data collection and aggregation. No one has set out how this data will be used, or how that application will help children, only that it’s possible to use the data in this way.
All good things are promised with each aggregation of data collection, and yet nothing good really comes of it in the end. We just get a more sophisticated matrix of surveillance, control, and intervention. There’s little difference between this and the data aggregation Edward Snowden revealed the NSA is doing between all the different federal agencies, only they’re doing it with kids and their families.
Especially coming from California where parents’ rights in schools are being undermined.
Cradle-to-Grave or Cradle-to-Career sounds like a desirable welfare state. No one left behind. But we’ve been romanced with this before. The stated purpose of safety, security, healthcare or education for all… it’s not possible from a centrally planned level. It’s possible from an individual or small community level, and never requires a one billion data point system.
If a private school or homeschool can generate a decent outcome without all that; if non-profits can generate decent outcomes without all that, then allow people to pursue those avenues freely and organically. It’s bad enough schools are circumventing parents when it comes to their children’s mental well-being, teaching things that parents might not agree with; but to then allow those same schools to collect and aggregate this much data on them? Seems suspicious.
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