At work today I had lunch with a few friends and we got to talking about how the school experience of today differs from when we were children. The conversation had an even better flavor, if you will, because we all come from different backgrounds and are of a different generation. In the 60’s in the city class size was 40 children to one teacher and you counted on parents teaching children what school failed to. In the 80’s (when I was in school) the extent of extra assistance that I was aware of was resource reading (at that point I guess someone figured out that if you struggled with reading, you would struggle with everything else). I was fortunate, not only did I like learning, it came easy to me, and even at this young age I had already developed the “people pleasing” desires and skills that I implement today and I did very well in school. I also saw what rural American schools were able to offer (I moved to South Dakota, a town with the population of 550 during high school). There wasn’t the extracurricular options, you took home economic or shop. All freshman took earth science, all sophomores took Biology… This wasn’t the case in larger, more funded areas.
Today, kids have resources for socialization and speech, fine motor skills, gross motor skills.... all kinds. I think these resourses are great. That said, parents still hold the responsibility of teaching their children what school cannot.
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