The most important thing to remember, the guiding principle, is to try to keep your son's self-esteem intact while he is in school. That is the real risk to his success and to his mental health. Once he's out of school, the world will be different. He'll find a niche where the fact that he can't spell well, or didn't read until he was eight, won't matter. But if he starts to hate himself because he istn' good at schoolwork, he'll fall into a hole that he'll be digging himself out of for the rest of his life.
I think that's pretty true, you know? It's really important for us to love one another.
As I ask about, I am finding that to be one of the main reasons parents home school their children.
ReplyDeleteHer "guiding principle" is not particularly revealing -- I mean it just makes common sense to try to help anyone who does not excell in the area of focus (here: academics)to feel valued in other ways. But what I do find interesting is that she has couched it in terms of "boys in academics". To me that is just another in a long list of indicators I have seen that we have swung the pendulum too far. We have gone from a society that did not allow girls to be educated to a society that actually gives girls the . . . what: edge, preference, support, accolades, or benefit of the doubt? I am not saying that I am not in favor of the pendulum swinging, and I'm not saying that it has swung "way too far" because we are certainly not excluding boys from education at this point. But when I frequently see, in a variety of schools and in age groups across the board, the academic acheivers as predominantly of the female gender, it does make me wonder. Are we inadvertently gearing education towards girls? And when we try to keep our son's "self esteem in tact" -- by focusing on sports or music or something else -- are we indicating to him that academics are not something to strive for or value and then setting a tone for his life along that line? By avoiding one hole am I leaving him shoveless for another one? Anyway it is pretty obvious that the public school system leaves something to be desired or else there whould not be so many finding other ways to meet the educational needs of their children. But, at this point, I still prefer to reap the benefits that the public school system does provide and be (often annoyingly) proactive in my child's education. I still don't think school is just to be gotten through and I don't think anyone can come through unscathed (self-esteem wise or any other wise) unless they focus on the academics they have gotten out of it.
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