Reading, Writing And Arithmetic

There seem to be a lot of reasons for sending your child to public school depending on who you talk to. From the kid's perspective, school is a chance to get out of the house and maybe have some fun with friends. And one of the values of sending a child to a social setting for school rather than going the home school route is it gives your child the chance to develop social skills which are almost as valuable as the academics.

But when it comes right down to it, for most parents, the central reason to send a child to school is for them to learn the basics of the subjects being taught which includes history, art, government, social studies, foreign language and yes reading, writing and arithmetic. If the school is successful at this one task, then anything else is secondary or lower on the priority list. Not only do you want your child to come out of each class with a good grade which builds up a good GPA in preparation for college, you want your kiddo to come out with a mastery of the subject. And if they can come out with a love or passion for each subject area, that is a tremendous bonus.

This is why it is maddening how little public school seems to focus on teaching. You can go to a parent's assembly or parent conference and go for much if not all of the meeting and hear nothing about the basics of the academics of what is going on at that school. In fact, if you dare to interrupt such a meeting to talk about the actual mission of school which is to give the children education in subjects, you often feel like you just introduced some form of obscenity to the discussion.

The emphasis in public school is far too often on behavior, conformity to the structure of school or on moral or ethical "lessons" the school likes to teach. The notifications you get from the school about your child are almost always about behavior and conformity and if you talk to the "teachers" at public schools, this is where their passion lies. It's as though the challenge of keeping 20-30 wild students tame and working within the structure of the school system has become the passion of the school far more than teaching students the subjects at hand is.

The sad thing is a lot of the time, the schools can distract parents and even students to where each and every day the entire focus of being in school is about obeying the system. Children are the first to notice that they seem enslaved to a system designed to only teach them how to be enslaved to the system.

To break this cycle of wasting your child's time on discipline and conformity training, private school is often the best route. The very reason may private schools spring into existence comes from the frustration parents have felt about getting the public schools to provide real education for their kids. So by establishing a private school, the founders made it a priority that the classes would be about teaching and about enabling students to learn and excel at academics.

What a relief it would be if when your child came home from school and you asked "what went on at school today?" you got a laundry list of academic areas of focus that your child is being taken into by the teachers of her school. This would be a breath of fresh air after hearing daily moaning about the discipline and lectures public schools give your kids with no interest in academics at all. And if we can find a school that goes back to that core value of reading, writing and arithmetic, that would be a school sending your child to go to every day, even if it is a greater cost. It's worth it if your child is really learning and if the school is actually doing its job of teaching.