On being a school mother again

Somehow, after a while, you come to believe what everyone is telling you, no matter how obvious it is that you should know better.

After four years of our family being out of the education system, I had started to think differently about school.

For the first two or three years, I just didn't think about school. I was so happy with what we were doing that the thought didn't cross my mind. However, as time went by, I found that I seemed to be exposed to ever more stories of school. And these stories were almost universally positive.

I actually often joked that schools became perfect the day we left, but despite having this insight, I started to doubt myself, and to think that perhaps schools really were full of wonderful positive experiences. So many mothers, eyes shining, would be telling me about how this or that experience at school was "just fabulous". That was often the phrase. The art teacher, the trip, the camp, the cultural group. Just fabulous.

The other big one was "she absolutely loves school". I used to be suspicious of this. I would remember specific examples (quite numerous) of mothers announcing that their children love school, only to have the child tell me a day or so later that "I wish I was homeschooled". In fact, only a few weeks ago a father informed me that his children "have loved all their teachers", only to have his daughter interrupt with "No, I hated Miss X". (He responded, "No you didn't. You loved her.")

Somehow, despite these moments of obvious self-delusion from school-parents, over time, I began to wonder whether perhaps my children were missing out on opportunities to form loving bonds with wonderful, caring, passionate, involved teachers.

I really don't know what I was thinking. I mean, it's not like my kids had never been to school. Firstborn went for two years. Let me just reiterate the key points I learned from that experience, some of which are put here in his own words, which are burned on my memory so well that I think I'm pretty much quoting him verbatim:

1. "Mum, in all the time I was at school, I never learned a single thing."

2. "Mum, every single day that I've gone to school, I would rather have been at home."

3. The teacher is busy. Sometimes your kid vomits 3 times before she notices. This is not love. In either direction.


Four years later, we are having Attempt Number Two At School. Only in the meantime, we have had the opportunity to experience other ways of living, other means of education. When we return to school, it is like returning to New Zealand after a long time overseas. It looks like a foreign country, and once-familiar rituals now seem bizarre.

I can't believe that I started to think that maybe my kids were missing out on learning. School just isn't about learning. It's about busyness, and chaotic organisation, and bells. It's about movement and noise. Occasionally children do learn something, almost despite the system.

I can't believe that I started to think that maybe my kids were missing out on fun. Sure, if you are socially confident, lunchtime is fun. But it's 50 minutes. Even if you also enjoy the bus ride, morning tea time, and PE (which is a big 'if'), there are still hours each day when you are sitting around being bored silly. You have to listen to teachers droning on about things you already know, listen to other kids give their boring long wrong answers to questions you're not interested in, and copy down large amounts of information and instructions from blackboards. Some weird busy little kids enjoy all of this maybe. I'd guess the vast majority simply accept it as the way things have been since before they can remember, and which will never change. Observing it from the outside, it feels like an insulting and rude waste of other human beings' lifetimes.

I can't believe that I started to think that maybe my kids were missing out on positive relationships with teachers. Teachers are in a tough job and they have to use every means at their disposal of social control, including emotional manipulation, dishonest threats, and social humiliation - all of which work particularly well on children because they usually lack the life experience to see through it. You're lucky if a teacher eventually gets to know your kid well enough to see that this one is honest, well-meaning, and sensitive, and doesn't need a psychological sledgehammer to keep him/her in line. This kind of environment isn't the optimum one for developing mutual admiration and trust, even if there were the time for meaningful one-on-one interaction.

The fact is, my son is at school purely because of numbers. Only 1% of kiwi kids are homeschooled, and at first, it wasn't hard to find a few like-minded friends out of that 1% - and a few is all you need. But over the years those few have dropped off, to the point where there were not sufficient available suitable friends to be found. They were all at school.

It sucks that a child has to go to school to find all the other children. He doesn't want or need the huge time commitment that sucks up his life. (Don't even get me started on the homework - I might scream.) He doesn't want or need the disrespectful methods of behavioural control. He doesn't want or need the dumbed-down and boring compulsory "learning".

So that is how it is to be a school mother again. It's a little like having to hold your child down while they take blood. Seeing the necessity of it doesn't make it pleasant. And now I think that a lot of parents, faced with the daily necessity of it, have decided to convince themselves that it is "fabulous". But I also know a lot of parents who are more like me, and while they might have different reasons for their kid being at school - reasons as diverse as that they lack the confidence to teach themselves, or that they need the daycare so they can work - that doesn't mean they pretend it's better than it is.

My son has a difficult decision ahead of him. His long days of freedom are gone. No longer can he spend 12 hours straight making and editing a movie, or practise piano six times in an afternoon. He comes home to hear that his siblings finished their formal education by 9am and spent the day at the beach. All this for the sake of some friends and a bit of team sports. It's a very high price to pay.