Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums Parenting and Advocacy How do you feel about the public school system?

Sorry to be so negative on this topic. I used to tell my husband that I went through a mourning period when I realized that the public school system that I had loved as a child was actually dead and had no hope of being resurrected.

What makes me particularly frustrated and upset is my son's nosedive with regard to his attitude to school and the adults in it. He went on a 15 minute diatribe the other day after I asked him if he wanted to learn about something. He screamed at me, "I don't want to LEARN about anything. Learning is the worst thing in the world and I hope that nobody on the planet ever has to learn anything ever. Learning is so horrible!"

I started to laugh. I thought that he was kidding because all DS loves to do is learn. Then I asked him what learning means. He said, "learning is what you do in school when you have to sit there all day and learn things that you already know. Learning is sitting and being bored and listening to grown ups talk about the most boring things and then they ignore you all day." His school environment is not allowing him to learn. And as administrators and teachers have told me many times, they are focused on the "high" Common Core standards and making sure that everyone passes the test. The teachers have no choice but to follow their CC aligned curriculum, the administrators have no choice but to enforce the teachers' following it. Everyone is focused on the test scores and bringing the bottom up. Any teacher with the means and the brains have left, by and large. So my son, and many other children who are merely above average are being held hostage in this nutty environment.