In the first part of an exclusive six-part interview with The Daily Caller’s Ginni Thomas, William Estrada — director of federal relations for the Home School Legal Defense Association — sharply criticized Melissa Harris-Perry for her recent comments in an MSNBC promotional segment regarding children and education.

In the segment, Harris-Perry said:

“We have never invested as much in public education as we should have because we’ve always had kind of a private notion of children. Your kid is yours and totally your responsibility. We haven’t had a very collective notion of these are our children. So part of it is we have to break through our kind of private idea that kids belong to their parents, or kids belong to their families, and recognize that kids belong to whole communities. Once it’s everybody’s responsibility, and not just the household’s, then we start making better investments.”

Estrada, who advocates for the right of parents to decide how to educate their children, has since hit back.

“Nothing could be further from the truth,” he said. “It doesn’t take a village to raise a child; it takes parents. Loving parents, in a home to raise a child.”

“This leftist ridiculous idea that children somehow belong to the state — I thought we defeated this back with socialism, back with fascism and other entities which said: ‘Children belong to the state, they will be trained by the state to be productive members of the state.'”

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