Parents Impede Social Engineering

Telegraph:

In the past generation, The Parent has become a different sort of animal altogether – much more interested, mobilised and demanding for its child when it comes to educational opportunity. This is, of course, a good thing for schools – those with parents who are involved, supportive and, crucially, fund-raising will of course achieve more. But it is also a problem for the social engineers. Because every time they come up with some initiative to help the less advantaged student, the cannier parent is, like Raffles, one step ahead.

I've always taken Plato's Republic as an argument that social engineering can only be truly successful if one acts completely immorally. Society would have to create a lottery to make sexual intercourse totally random, but then rig the lottery without telling the citizens to arrange suitable couplings, and then separate parent and child such that neither even knows who the other is. You know, act completely contrary to every basic human instinct.