Category: Education Article

by Terry Heick

You try to fake it, but it limps right out of your mouth, barely alive: “How was school?”

You might use a slight variation like, “What’d you learn in school today?” but in a single sentence, all that is wrong with ‘school.’

First, the detachment–you literally have no idea what they’re learning or why. (You leave that up to school because that’s what school’s for, right?) Which means you know very little about what your children are coming to understand about the world, only able to speak about it in vague terms of content areas (e.g., math, history).

Then, there’s the implication–they don’t talk about the way that they’ve been moved or impressed upon or changed but in the rarest cases; you have to drag it out of them.

And there’s also the matter of form–you ask them as if a developing learner will be able to

Three hundred years later, post-war parents were powerless against the threat of nuclear attack but could control whether their children ate enough servings of fruits, vegetables, bread, and dairy each day. Parents in the 1970s and 1980s seem, from today’s vantage point, irrationally obsessed with a fear of kidnapping, which may reflect a more deep-seated worry about whether the entry of women into the workforce was a form of child abandonment. The tendency for parents today to control their children’s time via over-scheduling of “enrichment” activities could be interpreted as a response (rational or irrational) to concerns about child safety, especially in light of the potential dangers lurking on nearby screens. The more likely drive toward the “concerted cultivation” of children, however, is a fear response to economic anxieties. The current generation of parents is the first to have less overall wealth, on average, than the preceding generation of parents.