School's out for summer

Yes, we are counting the days. I wonder how the home schoolers generate the excitement, the frenzy, the Prom & all that. Well, home schooling makes me wonder a lot of things, like why would anyone want their kid to be 'that' kid. And if you, the teacher, select the curriculum where do you, the parent, get off complaining that they don't teach you stuff that's useful in the real world only to have your kids realize how woefully out of touch with reality you are? Yep, the public school provides the kids with a lot of intangible take-aways that just give me a big warm fuzzy feeling about the ability of the next generation to run things.

I guess Catholic schools may not be so bad, if you don't worry about your kids being around their clergy. For a long time it was the church rather the government that was the keeper of the knowledge and if you knew something you learnt it there, not that I necessarily would want to return to the dark ages. I guess most places it's still the church that does the schooling, places where there is a greater separation of the classes. And the people there hope to keep 'em separated, if you're under 18 you won't be doing any time. ( yeah if my kids had been home school I probably wouldn't have ever heard that lyric)

The recent plans to eviscerate the public schools and give the funding to charter schools instead are just another round of attempts to create class struggle here in the USofA. An attempt to further polarize the populace. I mean to say that the overwhelming majority of us USofAliens (90%) send our blessed little progeny off to public schools. Therefore the cost and quality of the school district or at least the perception of the school district's cost and quality is the single biggest factor in selecting a home. Well, a lot of us don't actually do any research into this, but we sure like to think we chose this place because of the good schools. The school district is the bit of the government where we are most able to exercise any pretense of democracy and the part of the government that is most likely to provide valuable services back in return. I question how we can bring ourselves to allow folks educated in private schools into public service, maybe a long penance in the armed services could make up for the deficiencies of having not been educated in public schools.

At the end of the day, I say that the single biggest reason for sending your kids to a private school is to prevent them from having to compete on a level field with the likes of my kids.