A place halfway between travesty and nightmare is appropriately fantastic, so it serves irony well that, according to the British Daily Mail, the Labor government proposes a "national parenting academy," depicted by Children's Minister Beverley Hughes as wielding the authority to "ensure parents who fail to do their duty with nursery rhymes are found and 'supported.'" For Heaven's sake, why? All to realize, in the Mail's words, "efforts to reduce anti-social behavior and improve educational standards by imposing rigorous controls on the lives of the youngest children."
"I don't know whether to laugh or cry," says Briton Andrew Stuttaford at National Review. Andrew, why not fight totalism with apothegms, as has always been done? To "Cobbler, Cobbler, Mend My Shoe":
Parents, parents, train your young!
To help, we'll show you how it's done.
If Mother Goose is taught too late
You're marched off to the magistrate.