While I am no booster of the public school system, I've come to view it as an entrenched, underperforming product of government on which we should place continual and unrelenting pressure to improve, but also a product of government that society doesn't have the will to completely scrap or rebuild. I am a product of public schools and I am familiar with public schooling's weaknesses as they were in the 1980's and early 1990's. I was comfortable enough with the system, however, to anticipate that I will one day send my own kids to public schools. I have long felt that as long as I was involved in my children's lives and their educations, we could overcome some of the weaknesses of the public schooling system. This past Friday night some seeds of doubt were planted in my brain.
I was at an area watering hole on Friday night, and at one point the conversation turned to the schools. To be specific, the conversation turned to the goings on at a smaller south central Wisconsin school district. I learned of some small programs for difficult children that disturbed me. For instance, at the elementary level, the school has in place a couple of policies. For angry children there is a room set aside. In this room there are pillows. The kids with anger management problems can go to this room anytime they feel angry and take out some of that anger on the pillows. They can stay there until the anger in them subsides. I'm sure that some genius bleeding heart thinks that this is a great way to get these kids to vent their anger without hurting anyone. Unfortunately, these kids need to learn how to control their anger and deal with it. This kind of pillow therapy does neither. All it does is forestall the day when they will be confronted with their own anger. Second, one would have to think that this teaches those kids how to game the system. Don't feel like sitting in class? Say you are angry and go off to the pillow room for a while. These kids aren't stupid. The second thing I was told about was the gum policy in the school. It is not allowed. Well, it isn't allowed for the well behaved kids, anyway. The not so well behaved, that's another matter. If they are chronic pen chewers, then in order to discourage that behavior, they are allowed to signal their teacher when they need to chew on something. They may then go up in front of the class and get a piece of gum from the teacher's desk. Nothing like signaling to the well behaved kids that their good behavior comes with fewer immediate benefits than bad behavior does.
Now I know these are both small little issues, but I find both troublesome. They are both weak-kneed policies that were not in place not so long ago when I was going through the public schools. I'm sure that there are other policies at other schools that will upset me more. That is what is concerning me now, many years ahead of when I'll need to worry about. I want my kids to go to a school that teaches kids that there are serious and significant consequences to bad behavior. I have no confidence that public schools are capable of this. I realize that this is only partially the school's problem. We also discussed how many parents refuse or are incapable to instill discipline in their children and the schools get stuck with problems and how, in many of those cases, the parents come to expect the schools to somehow 'fix' these kids when they've made no effort themselves. I'm sympathetic to what school employees have to deal with, but at the same time I don't want my kids learning the bad lessons examples like the above can teach. Perhaps I'll give private schools a little more thought in the coming years.
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