Dr. Moore Speaks on the Institutionalization of Children

It’s risky to ship your little ones off if you personally like being home in the bosom of your family — the Golden Rule suggests you’d better heed this:

“. . . the earlier you institutionalize your child, the earlier he will institutionalize you!”

– Dr. Raymond S. Moore, Remarks to The World Congress of Families II-Geneva 1999, “History, Research and Common Sense for Great Families and Schools” http://www.worldcongress.org/wcf2_spkrs/wcf2_moore.htm

Raymond S. Moore, Ph.D. is the author of numerous books on children, education, and cultural questions. He was chairman of the 1960 White House Conference on Children and Youth, a U.S. Delegate to UNESCO, and a co-founder of the Family Research Council.

Here’s a larger excerpt, for context, and to explain why my own education doctorate and public school career helped me decide NOT to send my own children to preschool even part-time —

“The learning tools — vision, hearing, cognition, nervous system– of average children who enroll at today’s early ages are not tempered for structured academic tasks…

Students lose physical and mental health from

1. uncertainty from leaving the family nest,
2. bafflement from social pressures and restrictions,
3. frustration from pressure to use their unready “learning tools” which can’t handle the regimentation and routine of formal lessons,
4. hyperactivity growing out of tattered nerves warring against rigid studies,
5. failure which flows from the episodes above,
6. delinquency which is failure’s twin, and
7. a sense of family lost, often including suicide.

In a British Columbia seminar, over 500 kindergarten teachers told me unanimously that they suffered overbearing pressures to prepare tots for early reading. Over their objections, teachers are ordered to enforce laws; judges must compel them.

Great cycles of history began with vigorous cultures awakening to the needs of children, but collapsing with frayed family ties. Have we failed to learn lessons which Ancient China, Greece and Rome learned too late – about day care and death houses for old folks? Do we without protest accept accelerating preschool and nursing home cultures which warn ominously that the earlier you institutionalize your child, the earlier he will institutionalize you!”