Last week our almost 5-year old daughter began Kindergarten at the public elementary school two blocks from our house. Such transitions are often anxious times for both child and parents.
Wednesday evening I attended the Back to School night and along with a dozen or more parents, overwhelmingly moms, I listened as the teacher explained her hopes for the children’s year within the school district’s mandated curriculum.
“Basically, Kindergarten is the new 1st Grade” explained the teacher, a 30-year veteran of the Oakland School District. She went on to explain how the school is required to have every 5-year old be able to read by the end of the year. “We teach reading 90 minutes each day. We have 2 science classes a week and math for a minimum of one hour a day” she explained. The school day for the four and five-year olds is 7 hours long. There are 3 recesses, including lunch and no music or art to speak of.
As I left, I thought: OMG, my daughter’s childhood is over. The rat race begins here. Get up, go to school, suffer, come home tired, go to bed, get up, go to school. While children don’t have to work in factories in this country, nor are parents forced to sell their children, the earlier and earlier start of the drudgery of work is no sign of social progress.
Additionally, on the day the country of Georgia was rewarded with $1 billion from the US government for doing the oil business’ dirty work, we were asked to donate toilet paper, hand sanitizer, paper, children’s snacks and other necessities on a long list the teacher gave out.
When picking up my girl the next day I chatted with the teacher. She had implied in her talk the night before that the curriculum was too much for the kids and not good for their general development, adding, “the children start raising their hands right after lunch to ask if it’s time to go home yet. They are tired.” She explained that her hands were tied with the high-performance pressure of the curriculum. I responded that the politicians play football with our kids to try to prove, through testing, that they’re strong on Education. She agreed.
The testing-driven style of education is a retreat to pre-civil rights era education. In Charles Dicken’s critique of Victorian Schools, Hard Times, the main character is a Member of Parliament and the owner of a local school. His railroad-method of education has no room for exploration, imagination or dissent. The children are seen as ‘little vessels’ to be filled to the brim with facts. The two strains of education were taught as one: for the children expected to become managers, they learnt how the teacher taught; for the children of the workers, their education was essentially about obedience and tipping your cap to the bosses’ “fact.”
Meanwhile there is the additional factor at our local school. It is considered an underperforming school. All schools with lower income children are this way. So, the school is under more pressure than many schools to raise test results,
Our neighborhood’ s racial makeup is about 50/50 black and white. In recent years very few black people have moved into the area. The newer management-types that could afford to move into the area, are a fairly friendly bunch of people. There are many Obama yard signs around and no Republican bumper stickers on the Prius cars in the neighborhood. During a recent vote on more funding for public libraries, supporter’s yard signs were everywhere.
Of the dozens of children eligible for Kindergarten in our neighborhood whose parents are white liberals, none have sent their kids to the local school. Not one. They either have gone private or they drive their kids to the few public schools up in the Oakland hills.
My partner told me that even she was stunned by the covert racism. My own mum that brought up my brothers and I, did not have the time or inclination to pick a local school. We just went to the school we were told to go to.
In contrast, the neurosis of local management-type parents is astounding. They talk about nothing but their children’s education. Stripping away the pretense of the higher calling of academics, essentially it’s all about getting their own kid to the front of the line. That, in their view, is the goal of parenting. The result will be anxious, socially unskilled children who will probably become anxious, socially unskilled adults. Perfect managers. They speak the diversity and tolerance talk, but do not recognize the advantage of the diversity and tolerance walk.
Our Kindergarten teacher does a great job. The mandated pressures on her to teach strictly by the book and timetable makes her job more difficult. However, she told me that our daughter is running around, chasing the boys in the playground and generally happy.
My daughter confided to me that she already has two boyfriends. On picking her up one afternoon, I noticed from a distance that while in line a boy pushed by her, she turned and jabbed the kid to get his attention. These apparently small skills, of learning how and when to stand up for yourself and how to enjoy the people around you are among the most important skills we learn at school.
With both of the big Presidential candidates committed to variations of No Child Left Behind, our kids will be forced to continue the monotony of fact-driven education, but working class kids will survive because they are more likely to see through the system’s veneer.
4 comments:
education is not exempt from the neoliberal ideal of every-person-for-themselves, rather than collective support, collective good.
to date, Canada has not enacted such draconian policies as to punish poor schools for poor performance within middle-class (white) testing mechanisms. but we do punish people for simply being poor in many other ways.
a good friend of mine is from China and I often ask her to recount her school experiences. lots of memorization, lots of studying, no group work, no fun, no play -- and as a result, most Chinese children grow up expecting to be told what to do, when to do it and where. now that's what I call a society of easily lead citizens.
maybe the US educational system hopes to achieve the results seen in Chinese schools -- they all test really well.
myra
Thanks for this. Question - you stated there is a "covert racism" in the choice between neighborhood public schools and private or out of district public shools. Does this in your opinion, apply only to the "white liberal" types you mention? There are large number of families who choose to send their child to private or out of district public schools who don't fit in this type. Just a thought as to what the motives are of other families. I think an education can be seen as a "way out" of poverty, neighborhood. Not necessarily getting your child to the front of the line but maybe just the opportunities that education CAN bring (not always does). I disagree with the "teaching to the test" and standards, etc. but am I naive to think that education(and what I mean by education is being exposed to different ideas,books, history, etc) can bring someone opportunity? I went to public school as did my brother and sister. We never learned how to get along with people at school, quite the opposite, it was filled with tension at least in my experience. Perhaps my sisters experience was different,she excelled at school because she wanted to get out of the house. I certainly think of myself as a socially unskilled adult (thats why I used drugs and drank!) but this had nothing to do with my mother pushing me to the front of the line. Just a thought - I would like to hear more
I lived for 20 years in what is referred to as a "bad" neighborhood. It was a bad neighborhood because it was low income, had a lot of drug activity and too many dark faces. Racism is behind much of the bad press Oakland California gets. There was a brief moment when there was a "white liberal" living there but that didn't last long. It was mostly black folks, one white single parent (me) and a couple Latinos.
Most people sent their kids to out of area public schools rather than the local one, which did not have a good reputation and was in an even worse neighborhood.
Most of the folks knew someone who lived in the hills and used that address and sent them to the public school up there. This school was also predominantly African American but was more diverse than the local school and had a better reputation.
I knew a number of the parents that did this and most of them were single mothers who were hoping their children would get a better education being around other races,(Europeans, Asians) and this would give their kids a better chance in life. An all black inner city school, one parent told me, does not receive as much attention as one that is in a "white" neighborhood with white kids, she wanted her boy to get the benefit of that.
With this particular parent, she applied for her kid using an address from up there and was told there was no vacancy. She believed that was racially motivated and asked me if she could apply again using my name which she said was more of a "white" name. I agreed and sure enough, her boy was accepted.
She sued the city I think. She initially asked me to come speak at city hall about it but I made it clear that even though my son was going there, I would speak on this issue but argue that we should not have to send our children to better neighborhoods for what we perceived, (true or not) was a better education. We should have better schools in all our neighborhoods.
She wasn't keen on me raising the issue of racism and class oppression in general so that was that.
Patricia makes the point that she thought of herself as socially unskilled and that is why she drank and used drugs. I used to think of myself the same way and my escape from this negative view of myself was the same as Patricia's. After all, it was my fault I wasn't a doctor or professor.
I used to think that an academic doing a presentation on something that I couldn't grasp was brilliant. After all, he must be brilliant because I couldn't understand it. So if the propaganda works and I think it is me that's stupid, drink and drugs can be the result.
Of course, the reverse is the real truth; if you can't explain the basics of something to an average person like me, you're pretty stupid yourself.
Thanks for all those that commented on my original posting. I got a lot of comments offline too.
I think that we're all agreed on the madness of a testing-crazed education system.
I also totally respect Patricia's point about helping your kids get out of poverty through education. My point was about the professionals/management types who are not in danger of poverty or their kids joining gangs. They think they are doing their kids a favor by keeping them away from 'low performing' kids/schools.
I looked up the stats for Oakland. Population: 35% are black, 31% white, 22% Latino and 15% Asian. We are a very diverse city. Oakland has a horrific level of murders. Last year 127 people were murdered in our city of 300,000 people. In London, England, they recorded 159 murders. London has 8 million residents!
Yet on homicides 77% of victims are black and only 3.2% are white. In the public schools 37% of students are black and a mere 7% are white.
My point on race, is that middle class white parents, who could help raise achievement levels in public schools, who's kids could benefit socially from being around poorer kids, are making a mistake by going private or shipping their kids uphill to higher performance (whiter) schools. My other point is these people are overwhelmingly Obama Democrats. What does that say?
Thanks again to Patricia and other comrades who posted.
Rob
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