What Have We Learned by Staying at Home with our Children?

If we are looking for a silver lining in the coronavirus crisis we may need look no further than our children forced to stay home during this quarantine. For some families, it may be a time of discovery of just how joyful it is to guide our children in learning at home. The manner in which schools have handled the crisis should also be raising suspicions about the efficacy of sending children to public school. By and large, what we have just witnessed is that schools just cut their students loose, without sending home any sort of curriculum or support for families to work with their children during the interim, as if to say “you're on your own until the schools can figure out what they are going to do.”

Why is it that schools don’t know what they’re supposed to be teaching next week? Why is it that we have to wait three or more weeks for them to get their act together so that the teacher can email the student lesson plans? It’s not like an effective medium for communication with the teacher doesn't already exist via email.

A conclusion is beginning to come into mind that our entire approach to education in the United States with its government-funded schools is not getting the job done. And, yet, the system seems very good at this whole college and career readiness idea, where they gear up parents to be prepared to pay a lot of money to colleges. But does college actually even lead most young people to viable careers anymore? Not so much, really, and at an inexcusable cost. So, maybe we need to take a step back, and really rethink our entire approach to educating our children in government schools. The coronavirus – perhaps fortuitously – has provided us not just an opportunity with all this time off, but the impetus to look closer at the means and results of public education.

We need to look first at how government schools have encouraged parents to believe they are not up to the task of educating their own children. Parents are taught that they are incapable. It seems to be an overarching message of our education bureaucracy – to make parents aware of just how inadequate they are, to make them feel uncertain about how well they could actually perform as educators at home.

So many parents accept being denied any input into what their child is taught, or entirely excluded on matters where their child might be struggling with serious issues like pregnancy or gender. The reason parents today may be so complacent is that they’ve been taught, as students, to behave and not question the way thigs are – by the very same system that now demands compliance from them as parents. Whatever school administrators demand, we have learned to comply with, without question. Our children are too precious to sacrifice on the altar of tradition or trained obedience.

The argument is made that by pulling our children out of public schools we deny them adequate socialization opportunities with their peers. But why are we thinking that by sticking our child in a room full of other children of his or her age somehow he or she will magically become socialized? In many public schools, despite policy, children are still being bullied instead of socialized. There are no guarantees that attending a public school means children will become better citizens in society.

What we're talking about here is education, preparation for successful living. We’re not talking about socialization. If our highest desire for our children is education, then socialization must take a back seat to that.