Couldn’t Have Put It Better, Myself
Our referral logs led me back to the following comment to a Kmareka post:
The fact of private schools is that parents can reign in or nullify the academic freedoms that make public and tenured institutions great opportunities to open young minds.
I couldn’t have put it better, myself. Even the incorrect usage of “reign” (should have been “rein”) is perfect. That is precisely why any Rhode Island parent with the resources should seriously consider private schools for his or her children.
Kids suffer from the mind-opening of tenured “professionals.” (The NEA’s Patrick Crowley has helpfully illustrated what children’s minds are being opened to.) It’s nearly disgusting, the presumption that random people with education degrees somehow have a fuller or more appropriate understanding of children’s needs than the kids’ own parents.
Would-be indoctrinators should stick to opening their own minds.
I can’t speak about other private schools, but having put four children through the Catholic schools here in RI, it is always remarkable to me how responsive these institutions are to parental concerns, and how flexible they are when new situations arise.
Justin, great point. I think that “opening” a childs mind is nurturing that is best delivered, calibrated, censored (and all those things) by parents. Teaching a child to discriminate, i.e. right from wrong, usual from unusual, funny from offensive (and all those things) during age 0 to about 18 helps them (and I say helps them protect themselves) from the anything-goes exposure they are sure to experience during college “education”, should they choose that path. I would rather my son and daughter make their own decision about whether Tom and his wife Bill is weird, or ok, based on the values they learned at home than how a taxpayer funded indoctrinator thinks they should think. I pay for my kids’ education so they learn math, science, language, history, and yes, RELIGION as well as art, music and phys-ed. I’ll take care of the values, its what my parents did. (By the way, I think Tom and Bill are “weird”, but I’ll never tell my children that 🙂