My wife and I have removed our children from the public school system and teach them at home. We've never regretted our decision to do so.
We expected very little from the public schools in the first place. We felt it was a form of civic duty to participate in the public life of whatever town we lived in as best we could, and our children would be the finest offering we could make in this regard. We still do feel this way, and hope that we are good neighbors and citizens here in our new home; we just realized that the current form of the public school system is a monolithic, alien presence in most any town, taking its bizarre cues from who knows who and who knows where.
We thought the public school would be passively bad; i.e., the curriculum would not be very demanding, and would not particularly reflect our worldview, but the children would be safe, and whatever guidance they required would be given to them at home. We were very, very wrong.
The public school system is not passively bad. It is actively -- malignantly -- bad. I'm not going to put any caveats in there. I'm sure there are many, many public educations that are worse than what we experienced, but even the best of them are very, very bad. Scholastically, they are inflexibly wedded to discredited approaches to teaching. No matter how many hundreds of thousands of subliterate and innumerate adults the public schools turn out, they refuse to acknowledge that all the "improvements" they've introduced in the last fifty years have been unmitigated failures. Then they demand more money and power. Not over your children; they have all the power there is over them already. Now they're going to tell you what to do, holding your kids as hostage.
Read about little Samuel Burgos. When he was seven, he brought a toy gun to school in his backpack. He has already served a year's suspension under the "county's zero tolerance weapons policy." If that seems a touch severe to you, hang on; when his parents brought him back to school a year later, they were informed that he was still expelled from school for another year. Would they like to enroll their son at the reform school?
"School board officials said the rules are quite clear and that the toy gun constituted a weapon."
If you ascribe to the ideas rampant in public school administration, that sentence makes some sort of sense, I guess. If you go by the dictionary definitions of a weapon, every child in school should be expelled for bringing a mouthful of teeth with them, too. Unlike the clear plastic bauble with the little pink tip on it that Samuel was toting, they really could be used to harm someone. The dictionary mentions satire as a weapon, too, perhaps more appropriately for this situation, though such concepts are lost on the humorless devotees of whole language instruction. When is a toy not a toy? When is an education not an education?
We have had personal experience with "zero tolerance" policies at schools our own children attended, and can testify that what they really mean is that the school administrators will tolerate no brake on their behavior. They will brook no discussion of their approach. The rules will be enforced capriciously, and the whim of a public school administrator can seem very capricious indeed to a sensible person, but under no circumstances will any parent or any other citizen have any input into what goes on in a school anymore. It is the same dynamic that prompts poorly informed and unreasonable people to simply call anyone who questions them in any way "a denier." It is not the issue that is being decided. Who decides is being decided. Here's a hint, parents: It's never you.
The school's administrators are not acting in loco parentis at the school anymore. They don't think that's enough, and they are teaching Samuel's parents that their views on what their children play with, and eat, and watch, and say in their own home will be determined by the school as well.
Read the rest. (h/t Pundit & Pundette)
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