I scan a lot of parenting blogs. I look for tips on my kid’s current stage as well as hints of what’s likely to be in our future. I still get caught short sometimes coping with day-to-day changes and expectations. And I like to be aware of what the looming mommy-war issues are–not because I want to participate, but just so I’m not caught off-guard by something. Call it defensive anticipatory blog-reading.
Recently Uppercase Woman wrote a post about trying to decide what to do for her child’s schooling. The usual questions: public school, private school, homeschooling, unschooling, and so on. Lots of interesting food for thought in the post and in the comment thread. But the most interesting comment to me was the following:
If it makes you feel any better, a lot of the negative things one hears in the media these days about “failing schools” and the horrors of standardized testing, etc., are fed to the media from right wingers who want to bust teachers unions and privatize public schools. OK, so I’m painting with a veeeery broad brush there, and I live in California so I obviously know nothing about schools in your area. (I also realize that individual kids can have bad experiences in any environment.) But having gone through the K selection process in an urban school district and having found a lovely public school, I can tell you that a lot of what one hears/reads in the media does not match up with reality in many public schools. You might want to check if your area has a chapter of the organization Parents for Public Schools to learn more about the options where you live.
I feel pretty stupid that I had not made the connection before. Of course it’s been clear to me for awhile that there are certain factions in society who are well-served by having an uneducated electorate, and that explains resistance to obvious opportunities for improvement. But it just had not occurred to me that such factions would of course also be well-served by suggesting that the public schools were worthless/harmful (just as they suggest that government is worthless/harmful). Just a slightly different take on who has incentive to promote what notions that I hadn’t thought about in quite that way.
