The October issue of The Atlantic has quite an article from staff writer George Packard. In it, he details his struggles as a good New York City liberal trying to navigate the minefield of doing what’s best for his children while still doing and believing all of the things that good East Coast Progressives are supposed to espouse.
It’s a long, and frankly tragic, article. It made me nauseous.
There’s so very much to unpack here though. He starts by telling about how he and his wife had to try to get their son into the very best preschools.
“Our son underwent his first school interview soon after turning 2. He’d been using words for about a year. An admissions officer at a private school with brand-new, beautifully and sustainably constructed art and dance studios gave him a piece of paper and crayons. While she questioned my wife and me about our work, our son drew a yellow circle over a green squiggle.”
Trying to get your son into a $30,000 a year preschool. Talk about your First World Problems! When my oldest son was two, we were just trying to get him to sit still and listen to some books, and not bother his baby sister! Leaving aside the question of how in the bloody hells a magazine staff writer manages to afford that (wife makes the lion’s share of the money, maybe?) this is the kind of idiotic scam that mostly just pisses me off. No toddler needs a $30k a year preschool. It’s a glorified baby-sitting service. You want your kids to actually learn things? Pick a parent to stay home! Of course, you can’t be a good Progressive and be a stay-at-home Mom (or Dad, for that matter).
But then, complications strike, which catapult George’s tale from an unrelatable series of laments about the price of daycare to a tragedy of child sacrifice.
Two years later we transferred him to a public kindergarten.
But there was something else—another claim on us. The current phrase for it is social justice. I’d rather use the word democracy, because it conveys the idea of equality and the need for a common life among citizens. No institution has more power to form human beings according to this idea than the public school. That was the original purpose of the “common schools” established by Horace Mann in the mid-19th century: to instill in children the knowledge and morality necessary for the success of republican government, while “embracing children of all religious, social, and ethnic backgrounds.”
Congratulations. Your need to be a good liberal and say the right things outweighs doing what’s best for your children. About what I expect from people who belong to the party that endorses murdering infants. That said, things were, according to George’s story, pretty good at first. The school had yet to get fully woke.
The big crack in the armor came when the school decided to try and eliminate standard tests on the grounds that they’re biased against minorities. Poor George had a decidedly un-woke thought:
We weren’t sure what to do. Instead of giving grades, teachers at our school wrote long, detailed, often deeply knowledgeable reports on each student. But we wanted to know how well our son was learning against an external standard. If he took the tests, he would miss a couple of days of class, but he would also learn to perform a basic task that would be part of his education for years to come.
Somewhere after the standardized testing debacle (which George eventually decides to have his some take), there’s an issue with genderless bathrooms. There’s another crack in George’s armor.
At times the new progressivism, for all its up-to-the-minuteness, carries a whiff of the 17th century, with heresy hunts and denunciations of sin and displays of self-mortification. The atmosphere of mental constriction in progressive milieus, the self-censorship and fear of public shaming, the intolerance of dissent—these are qualities of an illiberal politics.
I asked myself if I was moving to the wrong side of a great moral cause because its tone was too loud, because it shook loose what I didn’t want to give up. It took me a long time to see that the new progressivism didn’t just carry my own politics further than I liked. It was actually hostile to principles without which I don’t believe democracy can survive. Liberals are always slow to realize that there can be friendly, idealistic people who have little use for liberal values.
The further decline of what was at least a pretty decent public school is a story that ought to end with people ending up behind bars, or at shamed from working in education forevermore. But this is New York, and failed presidential candidate Bill de Blasio keeps doubling down on stupid. It all became too much for George and his wife, who at least had the sense to enroll their daughter in a private charter school. Their son, however, continues to be a living sacrifice to the gods of progressive education.
The article ends with this heartbreaking question from the son:
“Isn’t school for learning math and science and reading,” he asked us one day, “not for teachers to tell us what to think about society?” He was responding as kids do when adults keep telling them what to think. He had what my wife called unpoliticized empathy.
Of course, since this is The Atlantic, George can’t give the right answer to that question, which would be “Yes, of course it is!”
By all accounts, we have a pretty good public school system here in Sioux Falls. There are definitely issues, but being in the heart of the upper-Midwest, we have yet to get the worst of the woke progressivism that infests the schools on the coasts, and in the Democrat-run cities around the country. But my wife and I made our choice a long time ago. Our kids didn’t need a five-figure preschool to succeed in Kindergarten. They needed a mom who could be home and read them stories, let them play with their siblings, and yes, even watch an extra Imagination Movers and Paw Patrol episode or two.
When the time came for actual school, we effortlessly got our kids into the most exclusive school in the state: our home. Judging by their annual standardized test scores, their academics are doing just fine. Judging by their church, sports, and after-school activities friends, their social skills are just fine too. We didn’t have to sweat about applying to a dozen schools. We did have to make some lifestyle choices about living where we could afford to on one income, and maybe we don’t have as many nice things as some people. I think we’ll be fine.
(Not-So) Mini-Me is a high school Freshman this year. He’s already starting to think about colleges. If he keeps his grades where they are so far, I don’t think he’ll have too much trouble getting in anywhere he wants to. He already understands the deal: we’ll pay what we can, but it won’t be much. Save your money, learn a trade, or trade some time to Uncle Sam. He’ll figure it out.
I understand that we’ve made a choice that not everyone can make. Sending your kids to public school, especially if you have no other viable options, doesn’t make you a bad parent. Sacrificing your children upon the altar of political wokeness, however, when you CLEARLY have other choices but are unwilling to make them, absolutely makes you a bad parent.
Thanks to Maggie’s Farm for finding the article in the first place.