pushing my buttons

Some people really know how to push my buttons.

I was watching a morning tv show last week and saw Hugh Mackay, talking about his new book, Advanced Australia Where? I have to say, Mr Mackay got my hackles up  back in august when I read his article in The Age about private schools and the abdicating middle class parents who send their children there.

I lost the homeschool battle with my husband. (He’s just not on board for it) So our children are currently enrolled at a private school. So yes, the article made me see red.

According to HM, parents cite the top reason for sending their children to private schools is the values they teach. Which also according to HM is because ‘we’, the upper middle class socio-economic stratum that  are creating a class rift, are abdicating our parental rights by having school teach the basic principles we should be teaching them ourselves at home.

What?

Okay firstly, I am not part of the uppermiddle socio-economic stratum. We are a one income family that has tightened the purse strings in order to give our children a better education since the public education system seems to be falling apart with the children becoming “collateral damage” as educatioon becomes more and more politicised, with knee jerk programs to trick the voting population into believeing they are actually doing something about falling literacy and numeracy rates.

Secondly, what is wrong with schools teaching values and morals? My kids spend six hours a day, five days a week in a school environment. I want them in an environment as close to home as I can get. The Catholic school my children attend take care not only of their intellectual growth but also their spiritual growth as you cannot have one without the other.  I am not abdicating my role as parent to their teachers, I have placed them in a school that reinforces all those things I have spent years teaching them myself. It’s called reinforcement.

I have extremely well mannered children. I know this because complete strangers will thank me and ask me how I managed to have children who behave well in public. (And at home)  Because I teach them values, manners and common curtesy, which are all reinforced in their schooling environment.

In an ideal world, I would be teaching my children at home.  I feel they have a lot more untapped potential, that won’t ever get tapped in a public or private school setting. But they are bright, personable and happy children. (Plus we tend to ‘partially homeschool’ anyway. I am very involved in their education)

After reading some more about Mr Mackay, (I even have his book) I have come to realise something. He was raised in a very religious household.  As such, he is very secular in his leanings. (by that I mean  anti-religious, though I believe most secular people are simply people who don’t go to church) The majority of private schools in Australia are religiously based. I have to wonder how much of his social commentary is based on impartial observation, (surveys and research aside) and how much is infulenced by his own experiences?  No matter how much data one collects, there is always a personal flavour to it, a personal agenda and a personal bias. 

I find this notion that HM keeps spouting to the public, that parents who pay more money to have their children educated are buying grades, values and contacts and being more absent in the lives of their children, to be inflammatory and not representative of all private school families. 

In fact, my experience shows the opposite. More parents involved in fund raising, more parents involved in donating their time to their school. I have no drivers lisence. When my son wanted to play cricket, whilst I could get him to training, getting him to the games was something I simply couldn’t do. So his coach, (a Dad whose son isn’t even in the same grade or class as my son)  offered to drive him to and from games.

The school my kids go to don’t have a school band, the one I tried to get them into did they simply didn’t have the capacity in her grade for any more students. So, that school arranged for her to be picked up by another mum, taken to that schools band practise before school and one of the ladies who works in the office drives her and another girl (a publicly schooled girl) back to their schools before roll call.  You tell me what public school would do that for a student?

Private schools are so prized and valued because the staff tend to go above and beyond, the teachers actually care and they have the better curriculum and resources.

In my opinion, nothing beats homeschooling. But private school comes in a very close second. To the Hugh Mackays of the world, not everybody fits into a nice little gross generalisation.  I love my kids very much, and I teach them everything that I can, to suggest that my choice of school makes me an absent parent, an abdicating parent, is down right insulting.