Barry Goldman-Hall of San Jose allows his imagination to run
wild in his letter to the editor published July 19. Mr.
Goldman-Hall accuses me of making
”
troubling, gratuitous and unnecessarily demeaning comments about
parents who chose to send their children to public schools, the
students themselves and the institutions.
”
Barry Goldman-Hall of San Jose allows his imagination to run wild in his letter to the editor published July 19. Mr. Goldman-Hall accuses me of making “troubling, gratuitous and unnecessarily demeaning comments about parents who chose to send their children to public schools, the students themselves and the institutions.”
Baloney. I made no comments whatsoever about the parents. My comments about the students were as follows: they want the high school experience, and some of them are ambivalent about the switch from homeschool to high school. Hardly demeaning or troubling.
If Mr. Goldman-Hall wants to know what I think of parents who send their kids to government schools, he should ask, instead of indulging in feverish and defensive speculation. Since he made these slurs, I will tell all of Gilroy, plus Mr. Goldman-Hall of San Jose, exactly what I think of parents who send their teenagers to government high school.
I think that practically all parents have the best interests of their children at heart. I think that practically all parents know their own children far better than any one else. I think that parents are uniquely suited to choose the educational venue that best suits their children’s needs.
I have nine friends and acquaintances who are sending their 10 teenagers to high school for the first time this year. I applaud them. I have every confidence that they are making the best possible choice for their children, given their individual circumstances.
So there.
Mr. Goldman-Hall’s other accusation, that I gratuitously denigrate public schools, has a grain of truth to it. The fact is that I am dissatisfied with the performance of high schools in general, public high schools in particular, and Gilroy High School specifically.
Therefore, I criticize. But I try never to denigrate, i.e. to defame unjustly, and certainly never to do so without cause, or gratuitously. I try to keep my complaints specific and focused on the issues of academic performance, or lack thereof, and the waste of classroom time.
In the case of the column of which Mr. Mr. Goldman-Hall complains, I did not criticize anything. All I said was that some homeschoolers, my daughter among them, do not want to go to school because they have absorbing interests: real lives.
Mr. Goldman-Hall took umbrage at this statement. He says that when his sons attended high school, they had real lives.
I am happy to hear it, Mr. Goldman-Hall. But I do not think that school life bears more than a fleeting resemblance to real life.
Where in real life is one’s day broken up by bells? In prison, perhaps, and the more poorly-run factories. Where in real life does one spend one’s day with 30 other persons of exactly one’s own age and one much older authority figure? Nowhere.
Where else does one run the risk of getting beaten up in the locker room? Prison, I suppose. Where else does one spend an hour now and again in a mass of people whipping oneself and the rest of the crowd into a frenzied show of “spirit?” Perhaps in totalitarian regimes.
Where else is cheating expected? Where else do blue and white days supplant Monday and Tuesday? Where else do lecturers punctuate their lectures with “Sh! Shhh!” Where else is life divided into semesters with summers off? Where else can you fail and get promoted for the sake of your self-esteem?
No, Mr. Goldman-Hall, I do not believe that high school reflects real life. But I am glad that your sons had a good experience at Independence and are now negotiating real life successfully.
As the discerning reader will note, I think high school culture is absurd. So why do I applaud the parents who choose to send their kids there?
Classes and subjects may be an artificial division of life, but I have never seen an alternative school come up with a viable alternative at the secondary school level.
Some students, maybe most, enjoy school spirit, pep rallies, homecoming, football and the prom. So if parents want to send their kids to that bizarre, unreal experience called high school in the pursuit of an education, more power to them.
Just don’t mistake it for real life.
