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School Provides Same Lessons It Was
Important for Today’s Adults to Get
By Linda Dobson
A neighbor called one morning, frantic because her day required a
couple of long distance trips to get several family members to necessary
doctor appointments. No matter how she figured her time and travel, getting
her son to kindergarten just didn’t fit into the puzzle that was becoming the
day ahead. Even with my help, his attendance at school just wasn’t falling
into place.
I finally said, “It sounds like it will be easier on everyone if you just take
him with you.”
“Can I do that?”
“Excuse me?”
“Well,” she clamored, “I never thought about him missing school.”
“Whose kid is he, anyway?” I asked. “As his mother, don’t you think you
have some say in what’s best for your family today?”
“I never thought about it like that before.”
School Determines How Your Family Lives
It is a good bet that if you have school-aged children, your family’s daily
routine and habits are strongly influenced by school’s presence in your life.
Perhaps, like my neighbor, you have never thought much about this
phenomenon, either, so here are a few questions to get your mind in gear.
Have you ever read an ad for an enlightening seminar on astronomy and
wished your son could go, if only he wasn’t in school? Has the opportunity
to take daytime aikido classes arisen, but you don’t want to “ask” the school
if your daughter can leave for an hour or two once a week? How about a
one-night appearance of a symphony in a city several hours away, but, no,
the kids have to get up for school the next day? Grandma is very sick in
another part of the country, but you don’t go care for her because the school
frowns upon extended absences? You’ve been offered a job that could
provide much more personal satisfaction, but changing schools would be
too traumatic for the children?
Have you thought of other circumstances that apply to your own family
yet? Most families bump into these or similar situations at one time or
another. Each one represents missed opportunity, a lost chance for pursuing
a personal interest, experiencing unusual or grand occasions that could
spark new interests, or fleeting moments that, in cases regarding Grandma,
may never be reclaimed and, more often than not, lead to regret that injures
us for a lifetime.
In trying to cut down on truancy, some schools enforce a program that
separates “excuses” into what may be termed legal or illegal. This boils
down to school administrators deciding ahead of time the reasons why a
family could allow its children to miss school. Since this need be done on a
school wide basis, individual family circumstances rarely enter the picture,
let alone the family’s belief of what is and what is not valuable to its
children. This attitude about school attendance leads us, collectively, to
accept that school – its schedule, its requirements, its queer notion of
education – should unquestioningly rate the center of your family’s universe.
This perspective of forcing children into classrooms, remember, arises as
part of a misguided attempt at education to begin with. Now here’s a deeper
aspect to consider: When it comes to being prepared to live a good, healthy
life, is that all there is?
School Providing Same Lessons with Single Focus
No one would argue that intellectual growth and stimulation are not
important to us as human beings. Yet through the attitudes and behavior
cultivated in us by our makers
we, as parents, let this objective run our lives as if it is the only significant
aspect of our children. It’s fundamental to remember this is the same
education it was so important for today’s adults to get. Now the same
businesses that helped create the self-serving curriculum you studied have
found it in their best interest to get “lean and mean,” and to use technology
to “downsize.” Even those who learned their lessons well find themselves in
long unemployment lines, shocked and numbed by the reality that what they
considered a successful life yesterday is today as disposable as a used
Pampers diaper.
Standing alone, mere intellectual development falls far short of providing
your child with an education worth having, let alone a life worth
celebrating. I think at some very deep level kids intuit this. I don’t think they
intellectually grasp what’s going on, nor could they necessarily put their
feelings into words, for words exist in the realm of the intellect. So consider
Benjamin Barber’s words written in late 1993:
“Dropping out is the national pastime, if by dropping out we mean giving
up the precious things of the mind and spirit in which America shows so
little interest and for which it offers so little payback.”
Folks, I warned you this is a wake-up call, and truth hits as hard as any
cold, wet rag across the face. The truth is America in the above sentence is
our society as it exists today. Not America as Thomas Jefferson imagined it
would be, nor Lincoln, nor the Roosevelts. Even Kennedy did not speak of
today’s America, for the full impact of the Technological and Information
Ages was still only in his imagination.
See also “The Art of Education: Part 1 of 4“
Today technology and information and their immense influence on
society are reality, continually changing the way we live. And if you’ll
examine those changes closely enough, for your children’s sake, I trust
you’ll find that they have taken us away from the meaningful, the “precious
things of mind and spirit,” in a constant pursuit of the meaningless, all for
the sake of the economy and the government, all under the guise of
perpetuating democracy.
Were we even attempting to live up to our democratic ideals, we would
not need education reform. The problem starts with our actions, everywhere
in society and particularly in the classroom, for our actions do not
demonstrate the example only we can set. Our forefathers’ words are empty,
existing only in classroom text books that do not reflect the society kids see
before them today.
We teach our children that money is a top priority by our example and
because their schooling – which takes an inordinate amount of their time
and controls their families’ schedules and lives – focuses on their place on
the economic ladder of tomorrow.
Folks, if parents don’t show their kids what’s important in life, nobody
else will. Your kids miss out on umpteen opportunities to join in real life
learning, gracefully practicing the art of education, because they are
compelled to attend school. A school, by the way, where at least in the
elementary grades, “an able student can be absent from school for an entire
week and, quite literally, catch up with all he has missed in a single
morning.”
“Yet for all the astonishing statistics, more astonishing still is that no one
seems to be listening.” – Benjamin R. Barber
“America Skips School,” Harper’s, November, 1993
If life is more than feeble attempts at intellectual stimulation and
preparation for jobs, and you are beginning to see how compulsory
attendance requirements undermine the natural flow of learning within the
context of family life, it’s time to look at what is happening to children in
school at yet a deeper level.