It is difficult to discriminate the voice of truth from amid the clamor raised by heated partisans.
The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins all of them imaginary.
History will have to record that the greatest tragedy of this period of social transition was not the strident clamor of the bad people but the appalling silence of the good people.
But for the children of the poorest people we're stripping the curriculum removing the arts and music and drilling the children into useful labor. We're not valuing a child for the time in which she actually is a child.