Education

I've been trying not to say anything about this but it's come to a head in this household. What are the schools doing to our children? Specifically, my children?

Sadly none of them are in Elementary school any more and I can't home-school them. The school day is long, and starts early. The high school begins its classes at 7.30am - that's the time I used to crawl out of bed on a school day back in the 1970's. DD1 leaves home an hour before that to catch the school bus and arrives at school thirty minutes before classes start. (I walked for 20-25 minutes and arrived at school at 8.45.) DD2 and DS are in middle school and they start half an hour after the high school, but leave an hour after DD1 because the schools are nearer and the bus comes later. They arrive home half an hour after DD1 in the afternoon so all three are home again by 3pm. I walked home and arrived just after 4pm if I went straight home, but often I was sidetracked with friends. The school day is so different. Even at secondary school we had a 15-minute break mid-morning and over an hour for lunch (so lots of free time to eat and hang out with friends). My children get about 10 minutes to eat lunch and the middle school's so-called recess lasts about five or ten minutes immediately following that. So times have changed and I'm in another country and it is what it is and I can't change it.

The school times are a contributing factor to the problems on the domestic front because none of us like to get up early in the morning, but another burden upon us all is homework. After a day of being cooped up in school, and sitting on a bus, instead of being free as a bird to play and relax, they have to do their homework. Experience has taught me and them that if they don't get started on it within an hour of arriving home, it won't get done before dinner and if isn't, it can take up the whole evening with the children just wanting to relax and go to bed.

Then there is the quality and quantity of the work, the texts and in some cases, the teaching. I think that's the most frustrating aspect. No education system is perfect. Teachers are bound by district and state requirements and guidelines (mandates), and making sure their students get good results in state tests. They can't teach what they want, when they want or how they want because presumed professionalism went out the window twenty years ago (perhaps longer in the US) and apparently teachers nowadays can't be trusted to know what's best or appropriate for the students in front of them. I know that. But is any of that right? Is one-size-fits-all really better for our children, just to ensure that all children get the exact same education? I really don't think so.

The children in our schools are deprived of certain valuable learning experiences – what we used to call "lessons". (See? the jargon is so much a part of everyday speech that I didn't even notice it.) Yes, the world is continually changing, but actually, the education a child needs for life hasn't changed all that much. What's important, especially for the under-13's, is an opportunity to breathe, to grow, to learn independence and the skills that will carry them safely from A to B. By they time they are 13 they should be ready for some serious academic learning to keep them out of trouble. OK, so that's generalizing. But isn't that what the schools are doing?