There's a style of argument you'll meet with often in life, which means you'll also meet with it often in the press and online. It consists of taking some straightforward and unobjectionable proposition and then exaggerating it to the point of absurdity. When the absurd version of it is challenged you can retreat to the more modest one. But then, of course, you could have started and finished with that and avoided talking nonsense in the first place. Louisa Young is talking obvious nonsense at Comment Is Free. She's doing so in saying how pleased she is that the proposed vetting scheme for children's writers going into schools has now been dropped - a scheme I, too, was opposed to, for the reasons I gave here. But in introducing her post, Young writes as follows:
Objecting to plans to protect children leaves you in a "When did you stop beating your wife?" position. What, you don't want to protect children? And the answer is, no, I don't. Babies, yes. But by the time they're six or seven I want to be bringing them up strong, independent and, stage by stage, able to protect themselves and each other. I want them to learn to trust their intuition, and use their skill and judgment to get out of bad situations without running to mama.
To want to bring children up 'stage by stage' strong, independent and able to protect themselves is good sense. But the very fact that it is 'stage by stage' means that earlier in the process they will not be able to protect themselves adequately against some of the potential dangers they might meet; and a child of six or seven still counts as rather early on. Not wanting to protect her is either bullshit or it's parental irresponsibility of a very high order. It's implicit in the way I began this post that here I think it's very probably the former.