But SoldierDad, am I wrong in assuming that your children are raised and gone — that they’re adults with their own lives now? I don’t mean to say this to undermine your experience as a Dad at all, but it is a VERY DIFFERENT world now, in the public schools, if you had young children attending today, in 2008. It has profoundly changed, even in the last 10 years. What was once considered perverse and outrageous behavior that would not have been tolerated whatsoever at school, is now common place and overlooked by staff and administration. Teaching children how to read and write and think is now the 2nd priority of schools — underneath survival and safety on campuses in every town in this country.
It is a very different world NOW, to raise children in. We have to know the REAL dangers and not just the imagined ones. Coming home each night to balance out what is happening to our children at publich school every day is like doing triage in an emergency room. And there isn’t enough hours in the evening or on the the weekends for our public schooled children to even TELL US what their life at Public school is like! They learn to suck it up — to endure the loneliness and ridicule, and to not make their parents feel badly for whatever reality they experience day to day.
Just writing this makes my heart ache for all the lost young people in this country who endure the private hell of public school, and for their parents, who believe it is their only choice, or they’re just too tired and overworked to think outside the work-place survival mentality themselves.
Just my thoughts...
It was not that many years ago that my children were in high school. My last one graduated in 2005 (and is now serving his country in the Army). I have an eight year old grandchild who attends public school. So, I don’t think I’m out of the loop, do you?
Private hell of public school? I really find this characterization to be insulting to me, especially since I work for a public school agency. I’ve worked for four different districts so far in my career, at more than 30 different schools (I’m an itinerent employee - right now I have three schools I work at), and I’ve yet to see the horrors that people keep describing. Are there problems? You bet. Is it all doom and gloom? No. Are public school teachers all evil liberals? No. Are all the students evil and behave badly? NO, No, No. This characterization of public schools based on small bits of data reported on and sensationalized by the media is outrageous. This is the same tactic that the anti-gun lobby is using to demonize firearms. They use a small number if incidents in a country of 300,000,000 people to justify their demonization of handguns and long guns. Is that not what people are doing to public education? Generalizing a few incidents to say that in the whole of the country public education is a horror is extremely bad form.