Please check the correct box...standardizing our lives

Yesterday I was talking to someone I know about schools. It was funny cause I felt all out of practice. My life situations and fears of the unknown were renting so much space in my head that I haven’t been contemplating my philosophies of life. The friend had started to send her toddler to a school a Montessori) that is one of the few schools I might send my child (if she wanted to go). She thought it was good, but was very concerned that they don’t test. She started talking about another mother who couldn’t get her child into some private school because when the school tested the child she had not done well. Also, she was concerned that you would never know if your child was learning what it needed to learn. It had been a long time since I had discussed testing with someone who was pro-testing and it sort of threw me off because a non-testing school is a plus in my book.

So, do you mind if I step up here on this soap box? I mean, I don’t think testing to find out how much you have retained about a subject you are learning about is anything to worry about, though I would hope that the child has been empowered to take the test or not. However, testing to see how much a child knows about a subject that adults have pushed on the child based on the child’s age is nonsensical to me. Sure kids need to know how to read and write (or do they?), but does it really matter if they are 16 or 21 when they have finished the doldrums of high school curriculum, or if they are 4 or 6 when they learn the ABCs? When there are so many things to know and learn, and when any one of us will only know a fraction of one percent of everything there is to know, is it really necessary to pit kids and adults against each other while learning the so-called “basics” at as early an age as possible? Hasn’t anyone noticed that the average middle-class suburban kid hot-boxed through school and then straight into college usually (I know exceptions) have very little common sense and very little sense of self these days? So many college students are NOT there because they want to be. Those students learn very little in college.

The testing conversation started to make me feel pulled back into that logic of competitive child rearing. The logic that says if kids aren’t learning algebra in 8th grade we should start teaching them algebra in 7th grade (at the same time brain scientists, not to mention teachers, say that most 7th graders are not developmentally ready to understand algebraic equations in 6th grade). The logic that assumes that the government knows what our kids are going to have to know in 15 or 30 years, even though the world is changing faster than we can keep up, and that they know at the precise age a child must learn each concept. The logic of competitive child-rearing dictates what every child needs to know according to how many years that the child has existed on this planet and assumes that all children, no matter what culture they are from, needs to know the same thing as every other child on the planet of similar age. We preach diversity and then push conformity. The status quo of educating doesn’t respect or honor the child’s interests or curiosity. It would rather waste large swathes of time teaching kids what they can’t or don’t want to learn instead of providing the tools that a child needs, in the here and now, in be successful in what he or she is driven to learn and do. Concerned adults tell the child what to learn under the pretense that we are preparing the child to live in a world that no one can actually predict. Believe me, it isn’t gonna look much like this one.

Unfortunately in this culture of competition, children often end up being ego extensions of their parents. As experts create developmental boxes while simultaneously presenting us with “studies” showing that children’s success and intelligence is a mixture or genes and environment, everything that the child does becomes a reflection of the parents; their genes and their ability to parent. A “bad” child, or one that doesn’t fit in, is an embarrassment to the family it comes from. Any time there is a psychopathic murderer, the press runs straight to the parents.

Children who don’t fit into the developmental boxes are pathologized. If your child develops well behind “schedule,” you receive sympathy and pity from other parents and interventions from “experts”, if your child develops well ahead of “schedule” you receive suspicion and hostility from other parents and intervention from “experts.” If you don’t pay attention to your child’s development you are ignorant and you are the one in need of intervention (parenting classes). When are children going to be respected and honored as complete human beings, today, with their own interests and dreams and talents and inner lives. They are not future human beings.

What is important for “power” is that we, the people, are competitive in the world of the Global Thieves and that we perpetuate the status quo that is currently running our world full speed into a brick wall while concentrating power into power and poverty into poverty…

My dream is that my child grows up in a world where she can be happy and can be herself, not one where over half of the population systematically takes drugs so that they can function in this warped reality we call normalcy.

We can do so much better for our children. I humbly step down. (To worry some more about things like where I am going to live next week.)