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SEPTEMBER 24, 2017 BOSTON SUNDAY GLOBE Ideas K5 The difficulty of describing day care Che Boston dMobe Founded 1872 JOHN W.HENRY Publisher BRIAN McGRORY Editor By Mark Peters VINAYMEHRA President and CFO LINDA PIZZUTI HENRY Managing Director ELLEN CLEGG Editor, Editorial Page CHRISTINE S. CHINLUND Managing Editor Editorial A massive project demands basic transparency ANEW BILL in Congress could expand tax credits for families who use child care. Or should we call it "day Or Or "nursery Or The terms that policy makers apply to early-childhood education evolve over time, and not just due to random shifts in bureaucratic fashion. While terms such as "day care" and "early learning" describe similar services, their names reflect entirely different world views about the role of women in society and about how very young children should be spending their time. According to Merriam-Webster, the term "day care," which suggests that someone is minding the kids when parents can't, has been around since at least 1898; the term preschool, which suggests a more academic focus, was in use by 1914.

"When I was a little girl, my mother was a 'nursery school said Ellen Frede, a senior co-director of the National Institute for Early Education Research. The preferred term in any given era, she explained, depended on whether the current emphasis was on freeing women to work or educating young children. Those issues are part of why Barbara Beatty a Wesleyan professor and author of "Preschool Education in America" calls the field "a giant patchwork" and a "politicized minefield." Day care wasn't always a fraught issue. In Colonial America, children went to "dame schools," which were part family day care and part nursery school. These schools were co-ed, involved basic ABCs and counting, and were held in a woman's house, often that of a widow who needed the money.

Stranger danger wasn't a concern for parents, because the "dame" was a neighbor and hardly unknown. Moreover, mothers and fathers who left their children with dame schools faced no stigma. "The fact that it was in a woman's home made it OK," Beatty said. "Infant schools" emerged in the late that a woman who had to work must have a defective husband who drinks or gambles his money away or, shudder, no husband. Among other criticisms, these day nurseries were labeled "baby farms" by upper-class folks who didn't need them.

Beatty called this "a top-down imposed class-bias perception." Contributing to the bad reputation of day nurseries was the emergence of kindergarten, a German word that reflects a romantic view of child-rearing and literally means "garden of children." In this conception, young children are fragile flowers who must be protected and nourished but not explicitly taught. Kindergartens received the societal stamp of approval, Beatty said, but if you sent your wee one to a so-called baby farm, well, you could expect eyebrow-raising and pooh-poohing. The romantic version of childhood didn't get extended to poor families. Nursery schools despite the word "school" were also play-focused when they emerged in the 1910s. They also catered to wealthier families, unlike the similarly named day nurseries.

Parallel to this divide, America has occasionally had excellent and near-universal child care but only in times of national emergency. During the Civil War, the Depression, and World War II, child care was suddenly deemed necessary. In the Rosie the Riveter era of World War II, mothers could send their tykes to "children's centers," brilliantly branded places that offered 24-7 care and meals, all in beautiful buildings with the fresh smell of patriotism. Yet efforts to expand government-funded child care fell victim to Cold War politics. In 1971, Richard Nixon vetoed a child care bill because, he said, it would promote communal child-rearing over families.

And "communal" was just a syllable shy of "communist." Communism is far down our list of concerns these days, but economic insecurity and the mommy wars keep stoking the debate about day care or whatever you prefer to call it. So far, there's no perfect word for a place for young children that's equal parts baby sitter and educator. As Frede notes, "Peo-ple keep trying to figure out a word that means both." 1820s, focusing on poor children of immigrants, often with the goal of teaching English and Christian values. "Day nurseries" turned up a few decades later. They focused on poor children whose mothers had to work.

Key word: "had." Some thought Mark Peters is the Ideas language writer. 1H ADOBE STOCK Violence Continued from Page Kl THE BIGGEST utility companies in Massachusetts aren't just part of the team judging the competition for a giant new state contract for renewable power they're also contestants. If that seems like an unorthodox arrangement worth keeping a watchful eye on well, it is. The state has received 46 proposals for one of the most important pending infrastructure projects in the Commonwealth: a massive electricity transmission line to bring more renewable power into New England. Each of the plans would meet the state's requirements in slightly different ways, but generally involve routes tapping into some combination of Canadian hydroelectric dams, northern New England The process gets dicey when the state's major utilities are also pitching their own transmission plans.

or Canadian wind power, and solar. The proposals stem from a law passed last year that's designed to shift the state away from fossil fuels. With the scheduled closure of the Pilgrim nuclear plant, and the retreat from climate leadership at the federal level, wiring the Massachusetts power grid to those resources has become more crucial than ever. The law requires Massachusetts utilities to enter into new long-term contracts for renewables, which make the large transmission projects viable. Since the utilities are the customers, they have a seat at the table alongside state regulators when the decision is made on which project (or projects) to choose.

But the process gets dicey when the state's major utilities are also pitching their own transmission plans. Eversource backs the Northern Pass project, which would route transmission through northern New Hampshire. National Grid is a partner in a proposed 59-mile transmission line in Vermont and New Hampshire. State officials are well aware of the dual roles the utilities play. The Department of Public Utilities has to sign off on any deal, and, at the urging of Attorney General Maura Healey, the law included a requirement that the state hire an independent evaluator to ensure that the process is fair.

The evaluator, Peregrine Energy, can stop any deal it doesn't feel was properly awarded. But there's another step the state could take to address the potential for appearance of conflict of interest in the process. The state should also commit to making public the scores used to determine winners. According to the state, evaluation criteria include such vague, subjective categories as "overall project viability" and "economic benefits to the Commonwealth." It's reasonable to consider those factors, but also reasonable to expect the analysis to be made public. If a transmission plan backed by one of the state's utilities wins, it will inevitably lead to questions about the fairness of the selection process even if that bid genuinely is the best for ratepayers.

Full transparency will help preserve confidence in the results. The state might take a page from the gaming commission, which publicly released its assessments of competing casino projects. Building new electric transmission, in some form, is a vital prerequisite in the effort to wean Massachusetts from its overreliance on natural gas, which now accounts for more than half of the state's electricity mix. The fact that so many firms have submitted bids is an encouraging sign. Now the state needs to deliver a fair, even-handed bid to keep that positive momentum going.

and thrown to the ground; the attackers also smashed her camera phone and destroyed the memory card. Despite the shocking video, some activists were unapologetic. "Violence against TERFs is always self-defense," said a tweet from the Edinburgh chapter of Action for Trans Health, using the derogatory acronym for "trans-exclusionary radical feminists." It "does not matter who 'instigated' a particular altercation, fascism is inherently violent." The British LGBT acceptance group Stonewall issued a condemnation of the violence but also condemned "dehumanizing discussion." In the United States, the trend toward the legitimation of political violence started long before Trump's election. The belief that words and ideas deemed offensive or hurtful to "marginalized" groups are a form of violence and injury has been Paradoxically, life in a comfortable, affluent society with historically low levels of violence may bolster the temptation to romanticize "noble" violence whether it's fantasizing about revolution or fantasizing about patriotic defense of the republic. Political polarization, and the growing tendency to demonize the opposition, plays a role as well: If people with a different political outlook are not just fellow citizens who disagree with you but the enemy, trying to bridge difference or seek compromise is pointless.

And once you've decided that it's OK, even desirable, to punch Nazis, your definition of who qualifies as a Nazi or a fascist is bound to keep which makes its own claims about multiracial culture as violence toward the white race. The result is a climate in which the specter of violence is present on America's public square in America in a way mostly unseen in a generation. Last month's tragedy in Charlottesville, where clashes between far-right demonstrators and their opponents culminated in a neo-Nazi ramming his car into counterprotesters, killing one woman and injuring 19 other people, shocked the nation; but it came on the heels of many other violent incidents. Trump rallies were marked by violence (which, it is only fair to say, was indeed on both sides) during the campaign. Campuses resemble war zones when controversial speakers visit.

At both extremes of the political spectrum, an increasingly visible fringe is openly admiring and emulating totalitarian death cults: swastikas and other Nazi or fascist symbolism on the far right, Communist flags on the far left. We are also witnessing, all across the political spectrum, a loss of confidence in the moral authority of government, to the point where government institutions are often perceived as illegitimate or barely legitimate at least when run by "the other side." An essential part of civilization is that we agree to abstain from violence except in self-defense and to give the government a monopoly on use of force, trusting it and its agents to use it only when appropriate. What happens when that trust is gone? There has been much finger-pointing on the question of who's more to blame for political violence. Liberals often point out that, in recent decades, deadly violence at least partly motivated by political extremism has come overwhelmingly from the right: neo-Nazis, antigovern-ment radicals, and white supremacists. But that could easily change.

In the 1970s, most extremism-related murders came from the left. Last year, according to the Anti-Defamation League, saw a spike in killings driven by black nationalism. And it's only by sheer luck that there were no fatalities when a left-wing activist shot Congressman Steve Scalise, a Republican, and three other people in June. Is there hope for de-escalation? For starters, we can reject the conflation of words and violence and of violent "self-defense" against emotional injuries. We can stop demonizing opponents.

And we must, no matter what our political views, repudiate and condemn violence by "our own" instead of trying to prove that the other tribe is worse. Cathy Young is a columnist atNewsday andRealClearPolitics.com. Follow her on Twitter CathyYoung63. H-'Ulierfii flH Suiter, grant thai I mH leak HHHHI to undent SPENCER PLATTGETTY IMAGES Candles are adorned with pictures of Heather Heyer at a vigil and march in Boston last month. Heyer was killed during a protest in Charlottesville, Va.

Charles H. Taylor Founder Publisher 1873-1921 William O. Taylor Publisher 1921-1955 Wm. Davis Taylor Publisher 1955-1977 William O. Taylor Publisher 1978-1997 Benjamin B.

Taylor Publisher 1997-1999 Richard H. Gilman Publisher 1999-2006 P. Steven Ainsley Publisher 2006-2009 Christopher M. Mayer Publisher 2009-2014 Laurence L. Winship Editor 1955-1965 Thomas Winship Editor 1965-1984 SENIOR DEPUTY MANAGING EDITORS Mark S.

Morrow Jennifer Peter DEPUTY MANAGING EDITORS Janice Page Arts and Newsroom Innovation Marjorie Pritchard Editorial Page David Dahl Print and Operations Jason M. Tuohey Digital Platforms and Audience Engagement Dante Ramos Ideas Larry Edelman News and Features BUSINESS MANAGEMENT Timothy G. Marken Chief Growth Officer Peter M. Doucette Chief Consumer Revenue Officer WadeSendall Vice President, Information Technology Jane Bowman Vice President, Marketing Strategic Partnerships Doug Most Director, Strategic Growth Initiatives Maura Davis McAuliffe General Counsel expanding. In England, whose cultural politics often echo our own, the "self-defense against fascism" excuse was used the other day to justify the beating of a 60-year-old feminist.

The disturbing incident, also caught on video, took place in London's Hyde Park as a few dozen women waited to find out the location of a controversial debate between transgender activists and "gender-critical feminists" who believe biological sex determines who is a woman. (The location had been kept secret due to concerns about violence.) The victim, who was filming arguments between the would-be attendees and protesters, was set upon by four people, hit in the face, increasingly common on the left. From this, it's only a short step to the view that it is moral and right to use actual physical violence to fight back against the more indirect, camouflaged violence of the oppressor. The idea that violence is an appropriate response to grievances has been on the rise as well: In the last several years, many progressives have been sympathetic to riots in response to the deaths of African-Americans at the hands of police. (Criticism of riots has even been decried as These trends have escalated with the rise of Trump, who is widely seen as a menace to the disadvantaged and the rise of the white nationalist "alt right,".