You're still assuming there's an environment they could walk away to that would be less toxic - not just differently toxic. That's not obvious. I think you're sitting in a position of having found a solution you think close to ideal for your DD and failing to understand that others may not have as good a choice available. I'm also very lucky in having a good solution for my DS right now - but choosing where he goes next is likely to involve a choice of problems that for him may be as bad as that homework. Frankly I feel offended by the wider implications of your words, and would expect parents already living with the best of a bunch of unsatisfactory choices to feel more offended.
But we are already living that ourselves.
We've chosen, for whatever it's worth, to make a lot of parental sacrifices in order to find
any workable solution. There are only two given the solution space that we're working in-- homeschool or what we're doing now. Neither of those is even what I'd call "good" by any stretch of the imagination.
I'm far from smug about this, and I don't deny for an instant that the system IS a large part of the problem.
But that system would not continue to exist at all if parents were not still buying into it. This is what I see locally-- parents are buying into it. They are
opting in for competitive reasons, ultimately. Not because the other options are
more toxic-- but because they perceive that those alternatives would/will place their kids at some kind of competitive disadvantage down the road. It's why they
are not choosing "sleep" from the list of options available.
Cricket is exactly on-target there. It was precisely what I picked up on in reading Dad's account of things. He's complaining because
it isn't perfect. For HIM. That, ultimately, is my point. We
could walk away-- any of us COULD. This is, when you get down to it, a very first-world sort of problem.
