‘Little Platoons’ Review: The Price Of Admission

Even in an ultra-competitive age, there is more to raising children than preparing them for college.

by Ian Marcus Corbin

Shortly after the Industrial Revolution began plucking workers from their ancestral villages and installing them in factory towns, a certain bargain was struck. The family would need to be mobile and smaller now—just mom, dad and the kids, most likely—but it would be sacrosanct, a haven in the heartless world of urban anonymity and mechanized production. If public life was to be marked by fierce competition and creative destruction, at least in the family home you would be free, safe, independent.

In “Little Platoons: A Defense of Family in a Competitive Age,” Matt Feeney outlines a troubling deviation from this bargain, a growing incursion of market forces into the haven of the family home. Mr. Feeney’s compact and compellingly argued book, which grew out of a 2016 article he wrote for the New Yorker, takes its title from Edmund Burke’s “Reflections on the Revolution in France.” There, counseling loyalty to one’s closest community, Burke writes that “to love the little platoon we belong to in society, is the first principle (the germ as it were) of public affections. It is the first link in the series by which we proceed towards a love to our country, and to mankind.” Mr. Feeney suggests that our little platoons are being diverted from this function and transformed from schools of public affection to weapons of public competition.

Mr. Feeney points to several breach points. Tech gadgets isolate us and prey on the idiosyncrasies of our brains. All-consuming youth sports fashion not just soccer players but entire soccer families. In the ambitious, competitive environments that Mr. Feeney describes, year-round sports clubs and camps promise not joyful play or healthy exertion but “development” and preparation for advancement to “the next level”—where the good, choice worthy thing is always a few hard steps away. If there is a terminus to this process, it is admission to a good college, which is, for many of the parents Mr. Feeney describes, the all-encompassing goal of child-rearing.

Ian Marcus Corbin is a co-director of the Human Network Initiative at Harvard and a senior fellow at Capita.