On Not Letting School Administrators Push You Around
If you have found yourself outraged, frustrated and feeling a little paranoid about guiding how your child is educated in public school, don’t be surprised because you are not alone. In fact, the only parents that don’t have this sensation are the ones who send their kids blindly off to public school with little concern about what is being taught there and accept the curriculum without question because it’s “what they are teaching at school.”
Perhaps at one time such blind acceptance of authority was considered noble. But this generation are not the kinds to simply accept that just because the school administration is a public institution, then they will always make the right decisions about how to educate our children. In fact, the very fact that public schools are government functions makes you suspicious that more likely than not they are making the wrong decisions and some amount of parental oversight is called for.
When Schools Turn Into Spys
What do you pay the school to do for your child? You pay the school to educate your child. You pay them to teach them the fundamental skills in life such as mathematics, history, language, logical thinking, public speaking, government and civic responsibility and perhaps in the arts as well. Of course, when it comes to public schools, we don’t pay them directly. But you pay taxes that eventually goes toward keeping the schools operational and paying the administrators and teachers.
So, even though with the government is standing in the middle of the relationship, the schools fundamentally work for you. But somehow over time, things have gotten turned around and schools have taken it upon themselves to be the bosses and judges of society and even of the parents of the children who attend the schools.
A Place Where You Cannot Protect Your Child
There are a lot of reasons that parents consider pulling their kids out of public schools and putting them in private institutions. The quality of education and lower teacher to student ratios often are sited. Private schools can do better with special needs or working with students with special talents as well. But by far the biggest reason for the exodus from public schools is the issue of drugs and violence in public school settings.
There have been plenty of movies that focus on gang life in high schools and the influence of adverse peer pressure that your child might undergo if exposed to negative elements at school. But oddly enough, the Hollywood representation of the influence of drugs and violence in public schools understates the case rather than overemphasizes it. To be blunt, the influence of drug cultures and of violent individuals can easily cause profound changes in your child and changes that are far from what you want for your offspring.
Teaching Subjects Or Teaching Students
Teaching school is as much a calling as it is a job. And in fact when you review the teachers at the school where your child will be going, you will notice that the good ones are as much missionaries with a zeal for guiding young minds as they are people who come to work to perform a function. But there can be no question that what makes any school great whether it’s the most expensive private school in town or a public school with overcrowded classes is the quality of the teachers who will be with your child for hours each and every day.
Becoming A Snob
When you talk to a lot of parents, its amazing how many consider the public school system to be the only option for getting a quality education for their children. It seems that this limited view of education would have fallen by the wayside by now with so many options for getting your kids through school. But that is how effective the government sponsored public schools have been at maintaining the myth that they are the only way to go and that public school is the end all and be all of education for kids like yours and mine.
They Want To Drug Your Child!
Anyone who has an interest in what is going on in the world of children’s health has noticed the explosion of medications and diagnosis of children with ADD, ADHD, Asperger syndrome or Autism. Does is strike you as strange that all of a sudden a huge percentage of otherwise normal and healthy children are being diagnosed with these dire diseases and schools and their associated medical counterparts are prescribing all manner of strange sounding drugs to “fix” these problems?
When we were growing up, just because a kid didn’t sit still in class, the teacher didn’t scream that the child had some disease and demand that he be drugged. But that is exactly what is happening to thousands of children in public schools all over this country. And at some point, it’s up to parents to stand up and say, “STOP. You are not going to keep pumping drugs into our kids just because you can’t control your classrooms.”
Special Schools For Special Kids
If you are a parent of a special needs child, you know something that the public schools either don’t know or they refuse to recognize. And that is any special need can be accommodated and worked around and your child is just as capable of excellence on an even playing field with any other child if his or her limitation is taken out of the picture.
It really is amazing when you think about it because so many people with special situations have gone on to such genius and excellent. From Stevie Wonder to Steven Hawkings, the schools should buy a clue that a physical disability or learning disability problem does not mean that child cannot be an outstanding student and go great things in school and in life. But public schools traditionally do a terrible job accommodating kids with special needs and when your child has a learning disability, their record is even worse.
The Government Wants Private Schools To Go Away
When you are trying to make an objective decision about whether to make the change of putting your child in private school versus keeping them in public school, you need objective advice. So naturally you want to turn to objective leaders in the area of child and adolescent education to give you that balanced viewpoint that will help you make a wise choice for your child. Private school is expensive so you want to make sure that if you go that route, you are doing the right thing for your child and the better education and school experience will be worth the money.
A Place For Your Gifted Child
When you recognize that your child is gifted in some particular area of talent or intellect, getting the school system to recognize that special ability can be a challenge. For the most part public schools are designed to accommodate the “normal” range of children. Because it’ a legal requirement not only that you send your child to school but that the state provides public schools to meet that need, most of the children in public school are neither gifted nor special needs.
As such the majority of the resources and the skills of the teachers are built around the need to teach large classes of average students. There is nothing wrong with this approach as our society depends on good education for everybody. But what this does mean is that public schools simply are not oriented toward providing specialized classes for gifted students.
The Rights Of Parents
Sometimes it seems that once you drop your children off at the door of the school that your rights as parents seem to disappear. This is one of the most disturbing things about sending your child off to school and to public school in particular. In many subtle ways, the school seems to send the message to you that you should go home and bake cookies and not meddle in what is going on in that school. And many parents just blindly accept that implied relationship as long as the children come home relatively happy and seem to be passing so they can move on to the next grade.