Skip to content
Subscriber Only

Hillary Clinton Conjures the Wisdom of French Parents

Universal pre-school isn't a new idea for the presidential candidate.
Former U.S. Secretary of State and Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton speaks during a forum on early childhood education at the YMCA of Strafford County June 15, 2015 in Rochester, New Hampshire.

Former U.S. Secretary of State and Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton speaks during a forum on early childhood education at the YMCA of Strafford County June 15, 2015 in Rochester, New Hampshire.

Photo by Darren McCollester/Getty Images

On Monday at a YMCA in New Hampshire, presidential candidate Hillary Clinton sat in front of construction-paper octopuses and hand-prints and read Eric Carle’s The Very Hungry Caterpillar to a pre-kindergarten class. It was a fitting entrée to her campaign's first set of policy proposals: universal, high-quality preschool for every American four-year-old.

As Bloomberg’s Jennifer Epstein reported, the morning program was a way for Clinton to embrace “her new role as a grandmother and her longer-term one as a child advocate.” It may have called to mind a policy of New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio: the introduction of universal pre-kindergarten in New York. (In April, Clinton appeared at an education center in Brownsville, New York, alongside New York City first lady Chirlane McCray to speak about early childhood care.)