Malkin is a tool.
I spent a summer working on pediatric psychosomatics with
this guy at the Child Study Center. It would be too time consuming to cover all of the factual errors in Malkin's drivel so I will just hit the high points.
1) Center kids are often parts of experiments that are solely observational . . . in essence no interaction with the researcher . . . just being kids. Block's study fits this bill. Malkin's claim of
allowing their kids to be "studied" by psychologists all day every day is just her infantile exaggeration.
2) The Center serves faculty AND staff which means the heavily liberal faculty kids could easily be matched with a strong cohort of conservative staff member kids. I found the kids to be ethnically and financially diverse which means EVERY kid at the Center was not the child of an African-American or Women's studies prof. I saw just as many granola/Birk parents as suits coming to pick up their kids.
3) The Center is a quality preschool and its cheap . . . but MOST Berkeley faculty and staff sent their kids SOMEWHERE else.
4) Malkin's premise is retarded b/c Block's study didn't say EVERY or even MOST kids grew up to be conservatives. Malkin's characterization of the study results is just plain dumb.
5) Malkin claims the preschoolers are rebelling against their liberal parents but their liberal parents aren't at the friggin' daycare. Their parents went to WORK! The whiny kids in Block's study had difficulty with themselves, other kids, and staff members. One could ASSUME they were also "whiny" at home but that wouldn't be evidence of rebelling against liberalism . . . by Malkin's logic these kids are rebelling against EVERYTHING.
6) Malkin claims personal knowledge of the Center but her description as I noted in #1 is highly suspect. Even though us HARD scientists chide our social science colleagues . . . they KNOW that you minimize interacting with your subjects unless the experiment REQUIRES interaction. More often than not observations of kids are made through one-way windows, videos, etc . . . not "hovering".
In sum, Malkin has no idea what she's talking about and the only people less informed than her are the ignorant few foolish enough to quote her.
From the Methods section: TWO nursery schools, SES diverse, with initial assessment in 1969-1971 and followup in 1989, 49 females 46 males.
Political perspective was a composite of 6 scales. The overall distribution favored liberalism but the authors noted the skew in the data basically meant conservatives were more homogeneous . . . in essence well characterized, while the liberal side tended to be more diverse (less group think).
I must admit I'm not all that impressed but it is an interesting study considering the strength of correlations between the pooled observations of 6 separate teachers and the self-identified political leanings two decades later.