Like I Have Time For This?

Here’s an interesting little article over at the Wall Street Journal’s blog: Why Kids Hate School.

The article is essentially a review of a new book coming out written by a couple of professors at the University of Texas, Arlington, Ben Agger and Beth Ann Shelton. The book is titled, I Hate School: Why American Kids Are Turned Off Learning.

Choice quotes from the article include:

Our schools are failing because they are warehouses and work houses…. They verge on penal colonies where teachers are wardens and students are inmates.

And:

…in an ideal school, “grading and testing would be minimized, and teachers would not be cops and dictators. Schools would have fewer desks and more open space…. Homework would be minimized, as real teaching and dialogue filled the day.”

I’m thinking I might need to get a hold of this book and have a look. Of course, it may not tell me anything that homeschoolers haven’t already been yelling at the top of our lungs for years and years.

But, it’s nice to know that other nonhomeschoolers are finally getting there.

In spite of the many articles and studies either already published or eagerly awaited, attesting to the normal social and academic development of homeschooled children, I still occasionally find myself worrying about the whole damn thing. Like, what if all those studies are utter crap, and this whole thing I’ve gotten myself into is really some sort of weird psychological disorder of mine, in which I simply CANNOT let go of my children. What if it’s that?

Usually, I begin to worry after a few weeks in which we are off schedule and grumpy and things aren’t going as smoothly as I would like.

But then, last week, I sat in a room with a bunch of women of various ages and listened as one of them told a story of how her family had moved to a new town and how the children at her new school treated her. How awful it was. Those children were cruel, she said. And after that, another woman told a story of her own school experiences, and how her peers tormented her for years just because she was tall. And then another woman began to speak. And another. And another. And, God help us, another.

And more than half of these women then told stories of turning to drugs, or developing eating disorders, simply to cope with school.

And then on the news, I saw that 14-year-old boy’s arsenal and listened to his plans for that high school that isn’t so far from where we live right now, and then I saw that there’s a school out there that feels the need to distribute birth control pills to sixth graders, and then I just stopped watching the news for a while, because there’s only so much one can take.

And then, after all that, we managed to have a very good week of schooling at home, and I realized that it’s okay. I’m okay, and the kids are okay, and while I may not be the perfect homeschooler, and my kids may not emerge from their homeschool experience 100% well-adjusted, in the end, they’ll be okay. Whatever hangups they acquire, public school is just not the answer.

And for about 3 days now, I’ve been able to avoid the worry. Maybe it’s because we’ve started our mornings this week snuggling together on the sofa under blankets, giggling with each other and waving to RegularDad as he drives off to work. Maybe it’s because I’m spending more time just reading to the kids and letting them color with the “good” markers while I read stories of the Trojan War and life in ancient Greece.

Or maybe it’s just because when Mom stops worrying, everybody stops worrying.

So, police in Thailand have really come up with a winning strategy to keep junior officers from committing petty misdemeanors like littering. They’re gonna make offenders wear hot-pink arm bands with Hello Kitty cartoons on them. But only in the station in front of fellow officers who will accordingly point and laugh at them and their ridiculous arm bands. Not out in public, where the rest of the population could potentially point at them and laugh. (And then after they’re done pointing and laughing, I imagine they’d spit on the sidewalk and drop their empty styrofoam coffee cups in the street.)

Here’s the article:

 http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20070806/ap_on_fe_st/odd_hello_kitty_cops

Here’s my favorite part:

“Simple warnings [to not commit petty crimes] no longer work. This new twist is expected to make them feel guilt and shame and prevent them from repeating the offense, no matter how minor,” said Pongpat, acting chief of the Crime Suppression Division in Bangkok.

(emphasis is mine)

I suspect that whoever thought up this brilliant idea clearly must have been educated in the United States public school system. Because, let’s face it, making kids feel guilt and shame throughout their entire educations is something that most public school teachers and administrators really excel at. I think it’s a required college course: Humiliation Tactics 101.

It amazes me that people remain so blind to the epidemic of bullying and humiliation in schools, and then from there it spreads into adult workplaces, the majority of which I’m sorry to say, are fraught with emotional dysfunction. We learn in school what the pecking order is, how to humiliate simply to avoid being humiliated, and then when we graduate we take what we learned into our adult lives, our professions, our families.

And STILL, when people find out that I homeschool, the very first concern they have continues to be: But how will my kids learn proper socialization?

Fucking morons, every one of them.

Every once in a while I start to doubt myself. I start to feel like maybe the school systems aren’t SO bad…that maybe I’ve gone a little Over The Top in my radical decision to homeschool…that maybe my mother-in-law is right (GASP!!!) and I should just go ahead and put the kids in school. 

When I get those (blessedly rare) feelings, I like to go read up on the educational system in the United States. You know, just sort of check in and see how they’re doing. It is summer, after all, so school shootings are down, so maybe there’d be some good news for schools for a change. Right?

Uh…no. Here’s the first story I came across in my casual check-up on public school news:

Oregon Student Finds School’s Toilet Water Cleaner Than Drinking Fountain’s.

Basically, this kid decided to challenge a school ban on students bringing bottled water into class by conducting bacterial testing on four of the school’s water fountains and comparing it to the water sitting in the toilets in the student bathrooms. Turns out the water in the toilet is actually cleaner (eg: less bacteria) than the water emerging from the drinking fountains.

The reason bottled water was banned from classrooms, by the way, is that students were dumping out the water to make room for their vodka or scotch or whatever’s fashionable these days and bringing their cocktails to school with them. Apparently, happy hour starts WAY early in Oregon. Either that or the classes are SO BAD that you just need a little SOMETHING to get you through. And really…can you blame them?

The student developed a fancy little Powerpoint presentation and took it to the Board of Ed, and they promptly cleaned the equipment and replaced the spigots on three of the contaminated drinking fountains. (But not on that fourth one, so watch out.) The school continues to uphold the ban on bottled water, and some teachers are now providing clean water in their classrooms. So much for Happy Hour.

For me the most poignant part of the article came at the very end, when the school principal was quoted as saying:

It was a great lesson. We don’t always see things in and about the school that are in need of repair…. You’d be surprised how clean the water is in a toilet.

Somehow, to me, he sounds just a little too excited about this information. And maybe like he’s known for FAR TOO LONG just exactly how clean that water is. Which is something I’ll now be spending the evening deciding Not To Think About Anymore.

But on the brighter side of things, at least now I’ve got some pretty serious ammo the next time my mother-in-law makes any comments regarding homeschooling. All I’ll have to do is whip out this article and show it to her, and she’ll not only agree that the girls should stay away from public schools FOREVER, but she’ll probably fly out to Oregon immediately and sanitize every water fountain in every school in the state.

Just in case.