Treating children with kid gloves, Bernie Sanders believed, was turning them into sexually repressed worker drones

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In a letter to the editor published in the Freeman in 1969, he [Bernie Sanders] called the growing disillusionment with public schooling "one of the most heartening signs in recent years," and he remarked that "the basic function of the schools is {to} set up in children patterns of docility and conformity - patterns designed not to create independent and free adults, but adults who will obey orders, be 'faithful' uncomplaining employees, and 'good' citizens." He took a similar tack in another essay, this one tongue in cheek, entitled "On Education."

Treating children with kid gloves, he believed, was turning them into sexually repressed worker drones. In a 1969 essay in the Freeman, he wrote, "In Vermont, at a state beach, a mother is reprimanded by Authority for allowing her 6 month old daughter to go about without her diapers on. Now, if children go around naked, they are liable to see each others sexual organs, and maybe even touch them. Terrible thing! If we {raise} children up like this it will probably ruin the whole pornography business, not to mention the large segment of the general economy which makes its money by playing on peoples sexual frustrations."

source: Article < "You Might Very Well Be the Cause of Cancer": Read Bernie Sanders' 1970s-Era Essays > by Tim Murphy; www.motherjones.com/politics/2015/07/bernie-sanders-vermont-freeman-sexual-freedom-fluoride; Mother Jones; 6 July 2015