Salon: Home-schooled and illiterate - for some kids it means isolation with little education

[Igel]

27. "Cannot"?

You're right. It's the playground that you learn these things, when there are responsible adults available for counseling and advising. The playground is precisely the part of school that is the least subject to regulation, and it precisely the part that is most commonly outside the classroom. In my youth I spent more time on the school playground on weekends, summers, and after school than during class time.

And it was on the playground that bullies bullied the weaker, that peer pressure created homophobes, that boys were taught to be sexist goons. That's still where this takes place.

But these are the things that the responsible parents I've met over the last 40 years routinely teach their kids. Some of the traits have become more frequent. Some less.

And they're still the things that many teachers still lament they're forced to teach because of all the irresponsible parents "out there." "character education" is something that some teachers embraced as part of a messianic vision. Most teachers looked at it and sighed. "Content. PD. Lesson plans. Classroom management. Procedures. Evaluations. Conformity with district curriculum guidelines. And now we get to build the New Soviet ... er, Modern Man."

Granted, they're the things that many irresponsible teachers feel are properly their job to teach. You just can't trust parents to love and rear their kids. We need professional child-rearers for the job, people who are truly enlightened and able to create the proper citizen for the way society should be. In the '60s and '70s and '80s people objected to Dewey's original vision of public education: It was intended to produce conformity, to educate the lesser Americans in how to properly behave as an American. Then in the '90s it returned, and many embraced it. As long as *their* values were being preached.

The problem is that the teachers often aren't there when the lessons are taught, however omniscient and omnipresent they believe themselves to be. And when they are present, they don't often teach the lessons in ways that stick. Even worse, they often teach in ways that make sure that the wrong lessons are learned.

In my classes kids don't learn how to deal with taunting and teasing. Taunting and teasing are prohibited by school rule. We defend against peer pressure and support students in resisting peer pressure. Drawing the line is decided by the principals; it's above the teachers' pay grade, and the students have little say in the matter. You *will* respect differences--at least publicly; if you're a raging homophobe you *will* keep it to yourself so that nobody has to be intimidated by your speech. To prevent intimidation, we restrict the behavior. Perhaps the bullies learn to not bully; but it's unclear, at best. It's clear that the putative underdogs learn to hide behind the teacher's authority for protection, even at age 17. Many haven't learned how to confront or argue with bullies, just how to get others to stand up for themselves. It's unclear what good this does in the larger social sense. Are the teachers really the agents for social change some see as their primary purpose?

Hard to say. My anecdotal observations pretty much say otherwise. The kids with irrespossible parents have been brought up in the same classrooms with kids with responsible parents. But it's not hard to tell which kids have responsible parents--there's some statistical noise, some good kids with irresponsible parents and bad kids with responsible parents, but that's not the way to bet. In other words, there's a small correlation between enlightened an teacher corps and responsible social behavior; there's a large correlation with responsible parents and responsible social behavior.