Is it fair to say that parents have shucked off much of the responsibility of what their children learn to the education system?
Sorry Rooster, that’s not entirely fair.
Some people don’t have the knowledge, skill or temperament to teach. That’s not necessarily the fault of those people, it’s just the way it is. For them, public schools are a better choice.
Then you’ve got people like my sister. She pulled her daughter out of public school and home-schooled for several years with disastrous results. She eventually put her daughter back into school at high-school age. My niece has since dropped out of school to go for a GED. From a safe distance we could see all sorts of problems along the way, and my niece has to suffer the consequences of my sister’s poor choices.
I agree it's not entirely fair. There are however many parents who have indeed taken this position, whether consciously or not. In many ways, it's difficult to blame them. They went through the same schooling system. There are a great many people who are pushed to the ends of every waking day to pay bills, etc. What a fortunate boon for the school system to have clients in such dire circumstances. If COVID has shown anything it's that schooling has become defacto child care. Parents need it in order to work, in order to pay their taxes in order to send their children to school. It is as water is to fish. And schools want the children earlier and earlier to have more time with impressionable minds. Oh to have 15k hours to mold young minds.
As per the anecdote, there are of course, countless stories of perfectly well-rounded, successful home educated children, as well. Though there will never be as many anecdotes about them, based strictly on numbers. There will also always be, magnitudes more anecdotes of children fucked up by government schools
A lot of it has to do with class. If your in a rich area you will get to go to a nice school, poor area you are stuck at a 'bad school' that on paper receives more funding but in reality the poor school is older, has less facilities and most of the money goes to feeding the kids.
Education is a state by state basis. Where I'm at education is all about the money, and to get that money you need to have high attendance. This creates a situation where schools will do anything to get that attendance up. Also sometimes charter and private schools do more harm than good to the public school system because they don't play by the same rules but get the funding from the same source.
If what you say is true TV it will be really fascinating to see what this batch of HS students will be like as adults. Fuck the mother fuckers who go to school boards and wild out.
The school system "fails", whether during a pandemic or by design because it's slow, unimaginative and incapable of making change. Everyone is waiting for the hierarchy to make their decisions for them. It doesn't attract imaginative, creative employees because it doesn't encourage them and doesn't want them. Entrepreneurs need not apply. If my memory serves, the average cost of a student to go to government school in my state is about $15k per year. I suspect that, adjusted for cost of living, that remains roughly consistent. That seems like an entirely reasonable sum for a very good education. Yet the common refrain remains, "We need more money, then we'd do better".
Poor children have benefited from a decent education, administered by a great educator just as affluent kids have had shitty educators (likely more than they have had good ones) providing shitty education.
I was just thinking about this again, some people’s financial situation don’t easily allow home-schooling. I can think of a lot of single-parent families whose only parent must work in order to survive. No shortage of those I’m sure.
COVID fucked everything up. Many kids failed upward. After talking to teachers they say that the students were under too much stress. Lose of income, taking care of siblings, working, stuck at home. It became a big class issue where poor kids failed because they had a bunch of stress put on them and rich kids fared better because they went through less and different trauma.
Of course, the terminal failings of the government school system long preceded COVID. It's done a fine job of fucking itself up without very much help. Kids have been "failing upwards" for a long time. Though the recent stress and hardship have certainly not done any favors to children, thanks in no small part to the unwillingness of the school system to follow science, things have been made much worse than they may have otherwise been.
