Our state was allowing students to enter into kindergarten at age 4 in January as long as they were age 5 by September but that’s now a hard requirement of 5 years old in January. I think every other state does 5 as the minimum. It’s impacting something like 11,000 kids going into the 24 school year, and impacting every daycare center in the state since they only have training and curriculum for students up to age 4.

As for having kids and Marxism, I will say this: You, as a parent, want to leave your kids in a world better than the one you grew up in. You hope that the struggles you endured are ones they never have to. For a long time, I didn’t know how to build a better future, but through reading Marx and listening to other Marxist thinkers, and understanding that all of the things I enjoy today were built on the backs of the struggles of the past, struggles endured by working-class families who ALSO were looking to leave their children in a better world than they had, the HOW became more clear. Marxism is like a north star, pointing me toward safe harbors, toward a better world not just for me and my kids, but for all of us, and all of our kids. It’s a whole other thing to plan for the future of your kids, you start to look at the world over a longer timeline, and you have to anticipate where things might be and hope that what you’re doing now will offer your kids a springboard into a fulfilling and successful life. Reading Marx and planning for the future came up in parallel to each other, but without Marx, I think that planning would have led to fear and pessimism. Marxism provided me with a framework for which to make those plans, or at least, provide my kids the tools they need to critically navigate the world so that they can be better about planning their own pathways.

I don’t know that I would have gotten to this place in my world view with out my kids, because they force me to look beyond the horizon I can see and off to the horizon they can see.