Can We Institutionalize Kindness?
15th November 2022
Remember orphanages? Orphanages used to be good places. Places that created a home for the homeless, structure for the parentless, love for the abandoned and lost. Alexander Hamilton was an orphan. His widow, Eliza, was rightly praised for founding the Orphan Asylum Society, the city’s first private orphanage, a home for hundreds of children.
And then, along the way, the orphanage, like so many institutions that are born with the best of intentions, became corrupted. It turned, over time, from its primary mission, and, slowly became a place for the administration and staff to assure their own futures. When the full weight of the inhumanity of orphanages became clear to all, they were phased out in favor of foster care and other approaches. (Note that Hamilton’s orphanage continues, in a different form, today).
And, of course, everyone who was forced to read Dickens in school (and, like Hillary Clinton, has never had an original idea or ounce of curiosity) thinks that it’s still 1840 England and orphanages are still the hellholes he described … much like the people who think this is still 1858 and blacks are still slaves.
We have seen this trend across virtually every institution that was designed to care for others. Public schools were once truly excellent. Then, as the institutions aged, they sought to do what all bureaucracies do over time: perpetuate themselves and maximize power. Teachers’ Unions are now about the teachers, not the students. And in recent years, we have seen the corruption of the once great institution of public schools extend to include the promotion of transgenderism and grooming. The question of whether students are being treated kindly is laughably distant from reality: today’s children are being brutally used and manipulated to promote and expand specific ideologies.
Much like schools in totalitarian states like Soviet Russia and Communist China. Or any Muslim-majority state anywhere.