A Quote by P. J. O'Rourke
I grew up going to public school, and they were huge public schools. I went to a school that had 3,200 kids, and I had grade school classes with 40-some kids. Discipline was rigid. Most of the learning was rote. It worked.
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The public schools in our neighborhood were so bad that the teachers in the school said you shouldn't send your kids here. My mother called around and found a school that was willing to give both me and my brother scholarship money. It's a classic story about black parents wanting more for their kids than they had for themselves.
I was a strong supporter of Montessori when my kids were very little. I homeschooled for a year, and then we did public school all the way through for the kids. I went to Catholic and public school depending on where I lived.
I was accepted to multiple fashion schools. But I had two kids when I was a teenager. My kids' mom already had two kids when she was still in high school. So I had to be in the streets early. Instead of going to fashion school, I took the street route.
I ended up going to public school in the first grade, and that's when I knew I had to be very strategic about my survival in school. I tried my best to be friends with people who were going to protect me.
In Bronxville, New York, we went to public school there, before London. Mother had a great belief in public school. She said it was very good for us to meet all the neighborhood kids.
I don't know if you've been in any inner-city schools, but it's pretty demoralizing. The kids come to class bright-eyed, enthusiastic - entering first grade really looking forward to school. By the fourth grade they're just completely turned off, and by the time they enter high school, they see little relationship between school and employment. It's bad enough you have incompetent teachers and schools that are poorly run, understaffed, and lack material resources. It's even worse when the kids themselves don't feel they have any stake in school.
But, once again, when I said I'm so grateful for my mom just being adamant about me staying in public school - that is what allowed me to be exposed to so many different types of people. I went to a high school that was by the beach. I elected to do bussing my junior high school years. And my first year of high school, I would take the bus from my neighborhood to the beach schools. And at those schools, you had such a mix of so many types of kids.
When I was superintendent of Denver Public Schools, I saw the potential of some of our best and brightest students cut short, punished for the actions of others - kids who had grown up and done well in our school system, and kids who know no other home but America. This is unacceptable.
Praise God for those of you who do homeschool. I can't emphasize enough: Do what you can to get your kids out of public school. If you can't afford to put them in a private Christian school, homeschool. Because they're being poisoned in the public schools. They're being brainwashed in the public schools, with all this secularism, with all this immorality that is being immersed into them on a daily basis.
My well-meaning parents decided to send me to a Catholic grade school to get a better education than I probably would have received at the local public school. They had no way of knowing that the school nuns, who were the majority of the teachers at this particular parochial school, were right-wing, card-carrying John Birch Society members.
I tried to talk to the graduates who haven't figured what they're going to do next. The kids who are heading in medical school or law school, they've got pretty much figured where they're headed in life. But there are so many kids out there, that are just going, they're still kids. They've always been promoted from grade to grade.
When I think back, I felt like I had the life that a lot of white American kids grew up with in the suburbs in the States. I started noticing, as Apartheid's grip weakened, that we had more and more black kids at school; I had more and more black friends. But I never really saw a separation between myself and the black kids at school.
I taught public school for 26 years, but I just can't do it anymore. For years I asked the school board to let me teach a curriculum that doesn't hurt kids, but they always had other fish to fry. If you hear of a job where I don't have to hurt kids to make a living, let me know. The truth is that schools don't really teach anything, but blind obedience.
School choice opponents are also dishonest when they speak of saving public schools. A Heritage Foundation survey found that 47 percent of House members and 51 percent of senators with school-age children enrolled them in private schools in 2001. Public school teachers enroll their children in private schools to a much greater extent than the general public, in some cities close to 50 percent.
My second year of teaching I was chosen to be a crisis intervention teacher. Our school was a kindergarten through fourth grade school with 1,500 kids, largely recent immigrants from Africa and South America. And it was in one of the poorest zip codes in the country. The classes were too big, the school was underfunded.
High school wasn't so bad though because, by then, I had worked out that there were far more nerdy kids and poor kids than there were rich, popular kids, so, at the very least, we had them outnumbered.
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