Letter to Congress

Hey there Congress. It’s me again. I know I’m always calling you about some issue or another—in fact, I just left one of my favorite reps, Russ Carnahan, a message only Tuesday about a local issue that came to my attention—but today I’d like to write to you to let you know that I do not, nor will I likely ever, trust you with my child’s education.

Sure, I believe that parents and community and travel and experience are all much better teachers than the system you created in order to churn out lots of like-minded unquestioning robots; but every time I hear another parent horror story about something in the classroom, I can’t help but get really, really peeved at you. Because you know what’s happening and you let it happen. Because you don’t really give a damn like you claim to do. Because it’s actually accomplishing the goal you set out for it to do in the first place—to make kids unthinking, loyal workers and soldiers, rather than critical thinking, well informed citizens—and you are pretty smug in this fact.

I recently had a friend have a horrible day when her seven-year-old supposedly flipped off another student. The teacher acknowledged that it wasn’t really flipping someone off—the kids had been trying to see who could bend their fingers farther as kids often do—but her daughter was still punished, still made to miss not one but TWO recesses (they are stuck sitting all day and this brief physical time is integral to their physical and emotional development, by the way; way to go in making them miss this), and still shamed, told that her parents would be notified and that she had done a bad thing.

The girl had no idea what she’d done. Her parents don’t just go around flipping people off; my best friend is a nurse and her husband is a soldier. Both are incredibly respectful people who served our country, and while they both joke around with other adults, neither do this—and both work very hard at being good parents. The teacher went off on my friend, yelling at her for fifteen minutes about how she can’t have her daughter “teaching” the other kids this “behavior,” and though my friend rightfully hung up on her, I wish she’d have gone off, too. I certainly would have.

I am often told by fellow progressives that I should keep my child in school so I can be an advocate there for other kids—that they suffer because I don’t put my little girl in with them. Seriously? This is why you don’t support homeschooling? That’s just not good enough for me. And it’s not good enough for my friend’s sweet little girl, who now thinks her middle finger is evil when this time two days ago it was just a finger. It’s really not good enough for any child, dear Congress, and we simply should not stand for it. I certainly won’t.