children and schools

As someone with no children of my own, I arguably have no legitimate business getting involved in the politics of education. But I have a sister and a future sister-in-law who are grade school teachers, and another sister who has three kids, from not-even-preschool to almost-middle-school, so I have occasion to be concerned anyway.

I’m concerned because the older of my two nieces is in the Gifted program. I was in such a program myself. These days, I can’t identify any positive benefit I derived from it. My only memory is that it instilled in me a harmful attitude that I was a genius and should be exempt from mundane responsibilities.

I’m concerned because my sister lives in a low-income neighborhood and her kids go (or will go) to a school that’s among the lowest rated in her state. She once Facebooked that she felt her kids were nonetheless receiving a good education from dedicated teachers. I asked her why she thought that was. (In the past, she has evidenced the bad attitude that as long as someone means well and tries hard, they deserve full credit for their intent regardless of the outcome of their actions, and anyone who criticizes them for falling short of their goal, doing more harm than good, or producing the opposite of their intended effect is a big mean poopy-head with an illegitimate opinion.) Her publicly-stated reasons were that her daughter never had a teacher she disliked and always got high grades and standardized test scores. In private, to avoid being accused of racism, she revealed an additional reason to me: she felt the school’s teacher ratings were contaminated by a significant population of recent immigrants who spoke little to no English and thus scored horribly on the state’s English-only review tests, making it appear that their teachers were lousy.

I’m concerned because neither of her parents is a particularly good academic or professional role model. No one in my family is, to the extent of anyone else I know who’s been to college or beyond. My father went into the Air Force right out of high school because that’s what his father and brother had done. That’s just what men did in his family. My mother went to a Catholic high school that offered girls three different tracks depending on their career intentions: a “medical” track for nurses, a “business” track for secretaries, and a general track for housewives. That’s just what women did in her town. I myself went to college for no other reason than that’s just what you did after high school if you were really smart (by which I mean you got good grades and knew a lot of stuff about hard subjects like math).

So here I am, across the country from relatives I’m concerned aren’t getting educated as well as they could be or should be and not super-confident in their parents to fix things. (Wow. Back-seat parenting is pretty damn easy, isn’t it?)

And let’s say I did get a chance to take part directly. What would I say? One of the things I want to impress on my nieces is that the point of school isn’t to get good grades, but to learn. But is it? It’s profound, and I think it’s an important distinction, but I worry it’s naïve. I can’t go ten paces without running into all manner of counterclaims as to the real point of public education. Some are outlandish conspiracy theories, like that it exists to instill all of society with an acceptance of, dependence on, and unthinking obedience to an intrusive omnipresent government. (I’m looking at you, Noam Chomsky.) Others are more reasoned, like James Portnow’s take that we’re still using a system modeled after the one used in 1850s Prussia, which was designed to operate with retired NCOs as teachers and deliver rote knowledge en masse to a totally uneducated population that needed to make a wholescale cultural shift from an agricultural society to an industrial one.