Decisions

A few weeks ago I did something very ordinary: I dropped off a check for $25. This check, along with a simple one-page form, served as one of Andres' "applications" (I use that word grudgingly) for preschool next year.

At the time I didn't think much of it. It was an item on my to-do list for the day, hovering somewhere between "Go to Russo's" and "Clean house." I was dressed as if I was doing the latter. I said hi to the director, asked some general questions like "Am I in the right place?" and "So what's the next step?", tried to get Andres to say hi (no surprise, he wouldn't) and then walked back to the car and drove off. That was it.

A few days later I started thinking that this may actually have been more of a momentous occasion than I had originally thought. Not only was I meeting the school's director for the first time (she seemed nice!), but she was meeting me and my son. Perhaps I should have thrown on a nicer shirt. Maybe the coffee cup should have stayed in the car. Did I say anything to offend her? Should I have pressed Andres more firmly to say hello? Not only was she meeting us for the first time, but no doubt she was evaluating us as well. I definitely should have let Natalia make the first impression.

My moment of trivial panic aside, dropping off the check did start me thinking a lot about education, specifically my own wishes for how Andres and Celia are taught. As most of you know both Natalia and I have our feet firmly planted in the field of education--as a teacher she does things, and as a curriculum developer I think about things that could be done by people like her.

[Our field has gotten its share of press recently; everything is broken, and everyone has an opinion about how to fix it. I typically have a hard time discussing ed reform because most people approach it from the perspective of their own upbringing--everyone went to school at some point, whether formal or not, and most debates inevitably turn towards "Well when I was in school..." Not helpful.]

My personal assessment of the K-12 education landscape that my kids are heading into is pretty bleak. I think we are prioritizing facts over knowledge and have a misguided obsession with measuring everything that a student (and, soon, a teacher) does during the school day. I think most teachers are hard-working, thoughtful people, and given a chance to actually teach during the day, would do some pretty amazing things. (And many of them already do despite all the constraints placed upon them.) I won't expound on that here--I think most of you know where I stand! But it depresses me that we are in this place.

I think the factory mentality of education--that you send kids into a school, and they emerge x amount of years later having learned y pieces of information--has infected how we think about all levels of school, even preschool; there seems to be precious little emphasis on just playing and exploring anymore. And ever since I dropped the check off a few weeks ago I can't shake the feeling of a growing pressure to send my child to the "right" school. It slips into conversations with other parents of toddlers, and at the Touch-a-Truck event a couple weekends ago, about 20 preschools had setup tables filled with fliers and pictures of their schools. They all looked wonderful--but I can only send my one child to one school. And I am largely critical of the idea that there is a right school for my child anyway--at the ripe old age of 3.5, are his learning habits so rigid already that he will thrive at one school but not another? I don't believe that. We are also blessed with so many good options around here that it would be foolish to follow this line of thinking too far.

My own wish for Andres as he begins his "formal" schooling (the very idea that preschool could be labeled "formal" seems laughable) is that he is surrounded by people who care about him and who teach him to think, to care, and to empathize. That's really about it. And I hope I keep these same wishes for him as he grows older, though I suspect they will change a bit.

I know this is not earth-shaking; I'm sure most parents hold these same wishes for their children. But I think it is easy to lose these goals in the mayhem of deciding which school is "best." By what metric do you decide? And is "best" even important? I don't think it is, but there seems to be a lot riding on the answer.

The more I think about this the more my head spins. And we're still talking about preschool--I hope I've figured a few things out by the time he and Celia apply to college. Yikes.