The Big Question, Which is Not Going to be Answered Today.

I am a stay-at-home father of two toddlers. I chose to walk away from public school teaching for, at the time, our first child’s welfare; daycare just didn’t work out! I do plan to return to teaching, however, I cannot help but question the unfairness and inconsistencies of public education, all of the problems associated with public schools, and how those problems will eventually affect my children’s education. I’ve seen too many beautiful children from good homes ruined by the beatings of the school drum as every child, ready or not, is shuffled from one lesson to another, one subject to another, and one grade to another. And down the road, little attention, it seems, is paid to making sure skills are taught or learned. The focus is on getting the kids through school rather than on ensuring they’ve actually learned something and can prove they’ve learned it. I can’t tell you the number of times I’ve seen or heard stories of kids being pushed, willingly or not, through the backdoor of a high school with a cheap paper diploma and a handful of prayers from his or her teachers and administrators who know those students are gigantic milestones behind their peers. Or, more importantly, I’ve seen too many smart, articulate, and naturally curious kids placed alongside lower-performing students and suffer interminably for it. Kids are brutal to one another. There, it seems, is nothing worse than for an impressionable child to be placed in a classroom littered with behavioral problems. Learning cannot happen when the teacher, expert in his or her subject area or not, is too busy making sure Johnny isn’t inappropriately touching Jill, beating the snot out of Billy, or starting fires under his desk with your child’s homework with Daddy’s Budweiser lighter. Why should the good kids suffer from the antics of feral children?

I, maybe arrogantly so, believe that I could teach just as well or better than an elementary or middle school teacher could with a classroom of unruly children. That’s not to say that there are not excellent school systems out there, there are. I worked in one. I doubt, however, that we’ll be able to afford to live in one of those communities where the housing market is 140% higher than in the surrounding communities. Education does have a price; and the better the education offered the higher the price. Having worked in two lower-income level, rural school districts, I’ve seen what kind of kids they produce. It’s not pretty. When tenth graders have never heard of the Holocaust and upper-level eleventh graders would rather sit through summer school than turn in their homework, that’s not good for anyone.

I do believe in public education. I also know that my wife and I will give our kids the tools they need to weather the storms of an undisciplined in class, or years of undisciplined classes. I wonder, though, if, knowing what I know about public education, if choosing not to homeschool our kids will be a decision we would live to regret?