And then I ran across this article, and I realized I'm not the only one who sees it. Christina Patterson sees it too, and writes this beautiful article about parents, school, and raising children. Please read the whole thing here.
In honor of December 1 finally arriving, I will make my first bad Christmas pun: And The Bon's heart grew three sizes that day!
If I were a parent, I think I'd be pleased to be told that I wasn't to blame, and that someone else should take away the "stigma" of anything that anyone thought I'd done wrong. If, for example, like the parents of some of the children at schools near me, I didn't bother to teach my child how to put its shoes on, or how to eat at a table, or how to use a sentence without using the word "fuck," and if I sent it to school without breakfast, or lunch, and didn't give it tea when it got home, I think I'd be quite pleased that the school didn't think that it was up to me to do "everything."
And if my child wasn't reading all that well, I might, like some parents who were quoted in the Evening Standard this week, quite like to stand at the school gates, and talk to the other parents about how the school was letting my child down. I might like to talk, for example, about how the children should be getting more homework, and how the teachers should be doing a better job.
But if I were a teacher, I think I might feel that if you'd gone to all the trouble of pushing something the size of a cat out of something that used to struggle with a speculum, then it wouldn't kill you to give it a couple of pieces of toast, and maybe a couple of fish fingers when it got home. And if I were a teacher at the school mentioned in the Standard this week, and was trying to teach a class where 80 percent of the students didn't speak English at home, I think I might also feel that it wouldn't kill the parents to swap a few minutes of The X Factor for, say, a few pages of The Gruffalo.
And if I saw the children I was teaching wearing T-shirts saying things like, "So many boys, so little time," and maybe even, through the T-shirt, a padded pink bra, I think I might wonder if parents needed a Ph.D. to know that it wasn't a great idea to buy their small daughters clothes that made them look as though they wanted to be paid for sex. I think I might even wonder why the bloody hell these people had bothered to push the cat-sized thing out of the thing that used to struggle with a speculum if they didn't want to feed it, or talk to it, or read to it, or dress it in relatively normal clothes.
So much common sense in such a tiny space will surely attract attention, right? Surely someone will read it and think they've been pretty silly and this is a good way to look at things, right? Someone will realize that parents could do a lot more to reinforce education and make their kids better people. Maybe one person will realize as a society we've dumped our kids on the village and the villagers are too busy to pay much attention.
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment