20150904 THE PERIL OF SCHOOL:

Can it be be this bad?

Just six years ago, if I read that school can be perilous or evil, I would have thought that the writer was a conspiracy freak. Granted, I did not idealize school since I was 12 years old. Both my parents worked at school. More exactly, mom had always been a teacher and a deputy principal. Dad was trained as a teacher, and I am sure he was considering teaching to be a holy mission at first. He was instantly made a school principal - guess, just for being a male. Yet he deserted this trade at the earliest opportunity. For the rest of his life he was humorously bitter about education and it's servants, and he was not the only such humorist I was listening to.

I would agree that school was not exactly a pinnacle of intellectuality and no moral authority. I would admit that it could be harmful, just like about everything in real life. No doubt, it could have been damaging for some, who often had their parents and themselves to blame - again, like practically every other social establishment. This implied that school was not to be taken as seriously and trusted as deeply as it wanted. Loving it would be deeply immoral. However, a notion that parents should defend their kids from school I would have rebuked as a gross exaggeration.

The beginning of the story is in SHNUMBERS. When my first child went to the first grade and by the end of it became a proud American math hater, I could not exclude that he actually was one of them.

I was not prepared. Based on my previous experience, I hoped that he would "improve". No, he was getting worse. By the time I started systematic home schooling, he was probably hopeless. It was not just math, but rather his attitude to teachers and parents alike. He was certain that a smart guy like him would never need this brain-wrenching stuff.

I tried to talk to school workers. Some were kind enough to write a number of emails. They were pretty lucid. Like, you know what, we are entrusted by the Government to hold your kids for 8 hours a day 5 days a week, administering carefully selected and thoroughly vetted scientific methods. If your child failed to respond, go look for a doctor.

Teaching the boy mathematics, I was finding him perfectly able to learn. So did "developmentalists". Yet every time I approached school math, I saw a different person.

Immediately after his little sister had suffered and failed the first grade math, I grabbed her and in some 20 Summer hours taught her long positional addition, once and forever. It helped. I could do it, and I did it before, but not in the US. I was seriously wondering if Americans were born mathblind. I was wrong. Mine were disabled at school.