Be True to Your Child
A Letter to a Friend
S. M. Hutchens on Choosing Schools
I have always been willing to give the public schools a chance. One reason is that one never knows how much bad one will encounter in private or religious schools or how much good in the public. I think it a reasonably common experience, for example, that parents who want a sound religion-based education for their children find the local choice to be vaguely liberal Catholic or firmly sectarian Protestant. Some “protection” is provided in either case, but at the cost of nurturing a form of Christianity that is insufficient to withstand the harder challenges the culture provides.
In the public schools there is less apparent safety, but lines between good and evil, Christianity and anti-Christianity, stand out in higher relief. Faith is challenged, but this provides the possibility of its strengthening, so that when the Christian child emerges from public secondary education, if he remains a Christian, he is more likely to be a confirmed one.
The Decision
The decisions made on public, private, or home education depend as much on the child’s qualities of mind as they do on the school itself, both of which the parents should know well enough to evaluate. We send our children to the public schools, debrief them when they encounter things contrary to the faith, and watch them for signs of depression.
There is enough tracking in our local system, and there are enough good teachers, that an intelligent child can still receive a decent education despite the mediocre overall quality produced by the combined efforts of the United States government and the citizens of Racine, Wisconsin, neither of which is constitutionally able to acknowledge that a school (or any other) system committed to the dual principles of equality and excellence is insane. Given that, the principal question for us has been whether our children can thrive in the strange and disorderly society that is the typical modern public school.
Mere dislike of school is not in itself cause for removal. School at its best involves discipline and labor in the face of which the child’s desire to be somewhere else, doing something else, is normal. A child consistently depressed by the school, however, is something else entirely, and calls for decisive action. To this end I think it good that the parents should decide where to send their children by considering, and periodically reassessing, four things: (1) the child’s strength of character—including his tendency to be depressed by school, (2) his academic aptitude, (3) the school’s academic competence, and (4) its orderliness, or lack thereof.
“School” as we have come to know it is not the best place to learn or grow, at least socially and intellectually, and even the best of school circumstances has inevitable negative effects. The bad in school is principally that it is a mirror of its society, demanding regimentation without true order and encouraging freedom without the responsibility of true liberty, swinging between these aspects of life it does not understand, unable to grasp the real requirements of either.
Because of this the sensitive and thoughtful child who has the advantage of good teaching and discipline at home will likely be frustrated by much of what he meets in school. This does not mean that he may not use it to his advantage, since it will teach him how the world is and give him the great advantage of learning to cope, and even to work creatively within it.
The parents, however, must view most schools for children, public or otherwise, differently than we once did here in the United States, according to the old song: “School days, school days. / Dear old golden rule days. / Reading and writing and ’rithmetic. / Taught to the tune of a hick’ry stick. . . .” The schools may rarely be relied upon, as the verse implies, to teach morality or academics, much less trusted to enforce the discipline necessary to do so.
S. M. Hutchens is a senior editor and longtime writer for Touchstone.
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