are you perhaps forgetting the “/s” modifier or do you really mean this?
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Teaching is a skill, and a profession. And “I could do that, how hard can it be?” are famous last words.
Even the bad teachers have had training on how to present information, how to adjust their style to suit the student, what to say, what not to say, and when to (not) say it. How to present information in a way which makes sense, and how to interpret a curriculum and when when not to follow it blindly.
What makes bad teachers bad is that they are bad at those skills. But what makes you, untrained in any of it, so sure you’d be better?
That’s not to say that teachers are unquestionable, any more than doctors or engineers or mechanics. It’s entirely possible for them to be wrong about something, and to be corrected by a layman. But the difference is that that’s that one thing, and the doctor has to go see another twenty patients today, with all sorts of things wrong, and be able to help. The mechanic has a fuel pump to fix here, and a cracked head there, and an old belt, and an old version of firmware in the controller, once they’ve dealt with your leaky coolant pipe. The teacher has something like thirty other kids in their class, from the bright kid who’s bored and needs to be a grade level ahead but there aren’t the resources to sort it out, to the dyslexic kid who is doing his best but needs closer to 1-on-1 attention and there aren’t the resources to do it, not to mention all the other kids, all different, all needing attention and care.
It’s possible that you’d be your kids’ best teacher ever and it would all be awesome. But it’s about as likely as being able to do surgery because you’ve watched Grey’s Anatomy. And if you screw it up, which you probably will, that’s your children you’re doing a disservice to. (To be fair, everyone screws up being a parent at some point too, and we haven’t ended civilisation yet. Children are resilient, but why make it harder for them?)
If you’re concerned about their education, then be active in it: sit them down once a week, or in the evening, and ask about what they learned. If they say that a thing confuses them, try going over it with them. If it confuses you to, contact the teacher and let them know: they might not have noticed your kid struggling. If the teacher is telling your kids things that you think are just wrong, then consider it a training for living in Capitalism. “You have a teacher telling you wrong things and expecting you to believe them without question? You are going to have a boss one day who does the same. Here’s where you learn to tell him what he wants to hear while knowing in your heart he’s ignorant. Choose your battles.”
Look at it also this way: every child being home-schooled is at least one parent who doesn’t have time for anything else. That’s a black mom who can’t take another job to get the family ahead of the bills. That’s a progressive family who aren’t getting involved in the school board. That’s kids who aren’t in the schoolyard to say to their friends “but what they just taught us is wrong” (whether factually, morally, or both), to counter the narrative by bringing other viewpoints from home.
The end result is progressive families tying themselves up in educating their children, taking their energy and time and money away from improving it for everyone. That’s the MAGAt pulling the public schools down into their pit of paranoid hysteria. That’s the GOP building charter schools, taking away funding and attendance from the public school system, so that the poor have the crumbling remnants of a public education system, the middle classes penure themselves paying for slightly better but even more derangedly partisan education, and the rich go to the private schools like they always have. It’s another front in the Culture Wars: the rich systematically dismantling the education system for everyone but themselves.
Home schooling sounds, at first, like a way of protecting yourself from that, but it’s a way which plays directly into it and helps it alone. The best way to protect public, universal education is to participate in it.
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I’m fascinated by people who think “this is the way things have always been” = “this is the way things should be.” I’m even more fascinated by just how little time it takes for people to think “this is the way things have always been.” It only seems to take a couple generations - but even seems to crop up in a single generation. Presumably for the same reason conservatives think that life was better/simpler/more innocent when they were children (because they were frickin’ children unaware of life’s complexities). They confused their own personal experience with their own family during the limited period of their childhood as a universal one (and desirable one, as it was so romanticized).
Yeah, though they were happy to vote for the quietly racist candidates as long as white supremacy wasn’t being challenged, but now they’re being more overt in their bigotries as they perceive the status quo changing. I feel like there were a couple times in US history when white supremacy was really challenged - the reconstruction and the civil rights movement, and both triggered violent responses by white supremacists. In the first case they won, in the second case many of them ultimately decided that white supremacy was sufficiently still in place. Now they’re feeling nervous again, and either they eventually win (or feel otherwise reassured that white supremacy is intact) or they’ll do their damndest to tear the country apart.
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So disappointing. I was under the impression that Athens GA was a wonderful place, full of all different types of people, all shouting out about their love of butter beans.
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They’ve largely settled on the idea that gay pride is the equivalent of white pride and that any recognition of differences between groups is equal to enforced hierarchy. They don’t squirm anymore, they just act like they’ve made a winning point. They’d rather the kid wear a pink triangle than draw a rainbow.
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'sides, thang-kinz fer lib-rulzz.
Nothing needs to be added to what you’ve said, but thank you for reminding me that I used to have a coworker who’d say, “I don’t have kids, why do I have to pay taxes that fund public education?” Finally one day I snapped and said, “Because you benefit from the education those kids are getting.”
I didn’t elaborate and they stopped speaking to me after that, but I wish I’d had your comment at the time. To take your examples of the doctor and the mechanic, even if they spent their entire lives being homeschooled or in private schools (which, in spite of the label, still enjoy tax breaks and some public funding), they still benefit, both directly and indirectly, from public education.
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That was one of the foundation stones of California Prop 13 in 1978, which plagues the state to this day. It was one of the more unfortunate examples of California setting a trend for the rest of the country.
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These days, I just go with the old, “Because taxes are not an a la carte subscription service that allows you to pick and choose how they are spent.”
ETA: I once had a similar argument with a Libertarian who felt that he shouldn’t have to pay taxes that are spent on roads because he doesn’t use roads.
I asked him, “What about when you go to the supermarket and buy food?”
And he scoffed and said, “I ride my bike to the supermarket. You should try it sometime.”
So I said, “Yeah, but the food, how does the food get to the supermarket? Is it airlifted in by helicopter? Trust me, you use roads.”
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I’m assuming the only way he could avoid using roads was to ride his bike through yards which must have made him really popular with his neighbors. Not surprising, though, to hear about a libertarian who thinks respect for private property only applies to him.
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One silver lining is that more people are reading the classic Maus than ever. One of the top books online at Amazon now. It is also readily available online no charge. Drive.Google has both volumes.
Several books have been suggested in addition. Night by Elie Wiesel is another.
Teach your children. And your children’s children. That they may never forget.
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