OleopteneA blog for Mara Collins

The Good Enough Education

September 13th, 2007

This first week of kindergarten has been exhausting, the long day leaves Søren just ragged, I drive him home and he gets irrational and sob-y over things that wouldn’t normally throw his little extroverted self for a loop, like not being able to sit next to his only friend in the class — in the world! — at the lunch table. I suspect that it’s exhaustion, that the long days and the overwhelming new schedule, this huge place and the inability to guess what’s going to happen next, thehundreds of faces he’s never seen before, the teacher he doesn’t yet have a relationship or trust with — they’re all just getting to him. That it will get easier, soon. I mean I know that, but of course I second-guess myself because I am still me — did we push too hard? Is he too young? Why didn’t we wait another year? What if this is it and he hates school forever? But, no, he’s ok, the situation is ok, I’m ok…

His best friend in Portland was in his class the first three days, a child whom we met through the Suzuki teacher-who-must-not-be-named, but her mother has pulled her out of the kindergarten class, because the kindergarten teacher didn’t speak Spanish very well. The mother, one of my good friends, whom I admire and trust, is a native Spanish speaker, and her daughter is already brilliantly, fluently bilingual. And I understand her frustration, but don’t share it. It’s just sort of one of those weird fate things to be going through this with this friend, because she was frustrated with the violin teacher months before I was, and stuck it out because she trusted me…

This is how the school is set up: there is a class of native English speakers who are learning Spanish as a second language, and a class of native Spanish speakers learning English as a second language. And when the kids achieve a certain degree of literacy, reading and writing in their native language, they get switched over to the other language, so when he can read and write in English, my son will begin learning to read and write in Spanish, switching to the other teacher, the one who teaches in Spanish all day every day. So, right now he’s getting some Spanish vocabulary from somebody who doesn’t speak Spanish perfectly. I have to admit, she still speaks better than I do.

I am doing that thing where I feel guilty for not being as upset by a situation as, in my head, a ‘good mother’ would be… I am grateful he’s getting even inadequate Spanish. My sixth grader has so far gotten NO second language instruction (I suppose you could count the sign language in his kindergarten…) Still Søren, my kindergartner, is devastated to have his friend leave the class. Sigh.

I know the school isn’t a perfect situation. None of my kids is getting a perfect education. But you know? It’s good enough. They’re being taught by people who are not perfect teachers but who care, who show up and do their best, who are sacrificing and not making much money for the hours that teaching just requires, and it’s a hard job. And I don’t know if I am accepting it because I’m such a glass-half-full person, or because I have a lot faith in my kids and how I’ve raised them and in the universe to provide the things we need the most or if I am just lazy/exhausted/stretched thin with four kids . Does it sound like a rationalization if I say I am trying to put my energy into things like making music with them, sharing a love of books with them, having fun bicycling and hiking with them, working at marriage and at being the kind of family I want them to grow up in?

Here’s my little philosophy education curse kicking in, too: I have to ask myself what my reason is for sending my kids to school. My father sent me a copy of John Taylor Gatto’s Dumbing Us Down last spring right before he retired from teaching high school, and a lot of Gatto’s arguments about the destructive power of schools to crush kids’ spirits and curiosity and teach them all of the wrong things, do make sense, but it still doesn’t fit exactly with how I am feeling: I liked school, my kids like it, and it’s good for them to be exposed to world views and communication styles and ways of being besides our own. They are smart enough to sort out what they want to keep for themselves. I send them to school so they can experiment with self-hood in an environment besides our family, and we get to see the sixth-grader developing this intense moral reasoning and code of loyalty and justice, a willingness to speak up for the things he believes in, our third-grader happily fitting in with a bunch of smart and personable good friends, writing really creative and imaginative things, and for how sort of dreamy and distracted he can be at home, it’s surprising to see that in the context of school he comes across as pretty disciplined and diligent; who knows what I’ll see the other two do?

I don’t pretend that education and schooling are the same thing. So it makes sense that the point of education is not the same as the point of schooling. I know I haven’t yet come out and stated “I believe the point of education is X, the point of schooling is Y” I just have a sense of them being different. I am pretty sure that the point of education is not getting into the right college, getting the right career, making more money than you need. In fact I think the question of the “point” of education is about as meaningful as the “point” of food — we’re naturally inclined towards it, it serves to enable us to do scores of other things, and it’s enjoyable in and of itself. Maybe I just feel fortunate that the schooling hasn’t gotten in the way of the kids’ educations so far? And the air I am breathing as a mother is trusting myself, that if and when a problem comes up, we will move to find the best solution we can for our child. And that right now I am not taking melting down every day after school as an indication of a real problem.

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