Sweet fancy Moses. From What’s Wrong With the World:
You just can’t make this stuff up. Scotland has passed and is beginning to implement a law which assigns every child in Scotland from birth to age eighteen a “named person,” selected by the government, whose job it is to “promote, support, or safeguard the wellbeing” of the child. Parents will not have a choice about whether or not to accept the assignment of an outside government busybody to their children. Some proponents of the law claim that “Families are not required to accept advice” from the named person.
Pardon me if I consider that to be patently disingenuous. We are talking here about a massive invasion of privacy in which an outside person is assigned, without parents’ consent, to monitor their child and make on-going recommendations for the child’s “well-being.” There is not the slightest doubt that parents who refuse to take the advice of these state social workers will face probable repercussions. The very assignment of the “named person” implies that someone else needs to be looking over the parents’ shoulders, knowing all sorts of information about the family and the children’s upbringing, and making recommendations. That the parents could simply blow these off without the slightest worry about further problems is a ludicrous idea. (Home education leaders in Scotland say that they are already seeing problems, though no details are given.)
It is a breathtaking thought that elected officials in Scotland should have passed such a violation of privacy. (And I hope they get thrown out at the next election for doing so.) The sheer data collection aspects of this are shocking. It is difficult to see how any sort of privacy for the child or for the family can survive this program, and whether home schooling will survive remains to be seen.