China's Public School Death Traps

Government corruption is a world-wide phenomena. The greater the power of government over the lives of individuals, the greater the corruption tends to be. In China, where the power of Communist, post-Mao, government is still very great, many parents in Sichuan Province are bereaved by the loss of their child under collapsed public schools. School after school proved more likely to collapse in the recent earthquake than other buildings, because they were built by corrupt Chinese officials. The fact that these buildings were known to be unsafe for many years, added to the parents anger. Remember also that Chinese parents are only allowed one child. Read more about this in this article by Andrew Jacobs in the New York Times.

Though governments love to use the welfare of children as a reason to expand their power, these power-enhanced governments cannot point at a history of providing for the well-being and safety of children. This is something for us to remember as the public school monopoly ossifies with time here into similar rigid propaganda machines and loses all care for the individual child. Already the propaganda is thick and the individual child is but scantly regarded.