Editorial: School days are ahead… unfortunately

School starts in just more than three weeks, and I’m not ready any more than my kids are.

We’ve had a great summer, you see. A 1970s type of summer filled with carefree times for the kids, riding bikes in the neighborhood and going on adventures with the neighborhood kids… which happens to include their cousins.

This was amplified by God gifting us with weather the way I remember it growing up – not as hot and with periodic thunderstorms. This 1970s climate was evidenced by the presence of neighborhood wildlife that has been scarce in recent years. We’ve had lots of fat hop toads, horny toads, and at least one green lizard running about. One local resident even reported on Facebook that he had seen fireflies near his front porch several days ago!

For summer vacation, we went hiking and fishing, and the kids got to capture tadpoles at their aunt’s place in Colorado. But most importantly, they spent most of their time letting their imaginations run wild and just being kids.

That is unfortunately all about to change as we get sucked back into the meat grinder that is modern public education where we get back on “schedules” and spend months doing pointless worksheets, trudging through AR books, and signing off on daily discipline logs… like parents need more paperwork.

I recently read a well-written blog in which a father penned an open letter to their child’s Kindergarten teacher. The author set the groundwork for the school year, said just what he thought of modern education, and longed for his child’s creativity to simply be unleashed. To which I say, “Ditto.”

To say I don’t like the modern school system would be to put it mildly. Don’t get me wrong. There are lots of fine people at our schools, and they all have the best intentions. In fact, I’m intentionally writing this now, before we even know who our kids’ teachers are this year, so that hopefully no one takes anything personally. I don’t really hold any teacher at fault for the situation anyway. I just think, for the most part, it was better when I was in school. I also want to say that I have a good working relationship with the school administration, but our education system is, unfortunately, corrupted by government standards, statistics, and nonsense.

As an entering second grader, Ben has already read more books than I read between Kindergarten and my senior year. I don’t know that we’ve accomplished anything, other than spur a deep dislike in our household for the stupid Accelerated Reader program. (My kids tell me “stupid” is a bad word, but sometimes it fits.) I learned to love to read without having a book a day shoved down my throat.

I could go on all day about the AR program. I think it ultimately drives a lot of kids away from reading, and, as you can imagine given my profession, I believe that isn’t a desirable outcome.

Let’s turn our attention to school supplies. Why do I have to send $1.50 for an AR folder that costs 50¢ at the store? Why doesn’t the school just budget a couple of hundred dollars and buy the stupid folders? (Sorry, there’s that word again.) Use my tax dollars wisely, please. Maybe we could skip the year-end trip to Wonderland and spring for some of these “essential” supplies. Indeed, maybe we could just skip the entire last week of school. We’re not learning anything that week anyway.

Why does a Kindergartener need ten glue sticks? When I was in Kindergarten we made one jar of Elmer’s paste last nine months.

And why do I need to put my kid’s name on the school supplies? Modern education just puts all the supplies in community buckets where we put them in our own individual boxes and had to keep up with them. Last year, my son complained that one of his classmates had bitten all the erasers off all the pencils. I’m not sure what was more disconcerting… the possibility that this other child had eaten a lot of rubber or the idea that my child was using a pencil that someone else’s little darling had been slobbering on. Either way, I wasn’t happy.

Then there’s the time issue. It’s a big ordeal if I don’t get my children to school by 8 o’clock on the dot. And that’s as it should be. We need to be punctual. But the school also needs to be appreciative of my time and not waste it unnecessarily. Specifically, if I have to take off work to go get my kids, I would appreciate it if you had them ready to go promptly at 3:30. I shouldn’t have to wait 20 minutes for the pep rally to end when I need to get to back to work. Think about the schedules of working parents when you plan things.

Our school system, unfortunately, spends a lot of time doing what parents should be doing. I blame welfare, the disintegration of families, and a lack of church-going for a bunch of that. Kids should be ready to learn and ready to interact with other children and with adults and know how to behave.

This summer was a reminder of how things should be… simpler and better. We need a quality of education and not just a quanity of eduction. We need a school that produces better than average students, better than average citizens, and not just better quantitative data and test scores.