How Do You Know When IT is Right?

I worry.  I worry deeply about my son’s education.  I want it to be stellar, spectacular even.  I want him to be happy.  I want us to be happy with the schools we choose and that is such a crap shoot these days.  Education is really needing to look elsewhere for funds since the government just does not want to pay for it anymore, and the more in bed the schools get with corporate partnerships the more beholden to them they will be, plaques like this math book is sponsored by McDonalds just may be a reality.  It may already have happened. 

Why do I want him to like school so much?  Maybe it’s because I didn’t.  At least not past 5^th grade, I suspect tho that it started before then.  Am I reaching for a goal here that I was unable to achieve?  Am I trying to go back to my childhood and fix what happened to me?  Don’t we all a little bit?  We are thinking of moving to Brooklyn to go to have him go to a school there.  The schools there seem to have a little more to offer.  When I say schools I mean public school.  I still believe in the public school system as it was set up and the promise it actually could have, especially if it was supported in the way it ought to be.  I want Teddy to experience a mix of cultures as well as a mix of specialty classes.  I want him to know a person who celebrates Kwanzaa and Ramadan as well as Hanukkah and Christmas.  And I want the teachers to show him things that I am not able to or haven’t thought up.  A friend of mine who loves to debate my educational understanding and ideas believes that I can give him what I want and have the schools supplement.  But social ties will get in the way of that as he gets older.  He will be involved with after school stuff and homework will take precedence in my supplementation of what I want him to learn, so as he gets older, I won’t be able to show him new ideas and spend hours performing science experiments with him.  The school will have to be his primary teacher and I will be the one supplementing them. 

When he was one, I said to my husband, Pete, that we have four years to make decisions about Teddy’s education.  We feel like, now that we have one year to go, we have more questions than answers, though there are some incredible websites out there to help, the educational experience is so personal that even if I went to take a tour of the school or schools that we are interested in we really won’t know how he will fit in, if his personal needs will be met and if he will succeed.  Yes, we will be there pretty much every step of the way to see what he needs and change things up as we go along, but can we really know? And what if we think we have it right, move to a new area of the city and it turns out to be horrible?  This is what my parents had to do when they moved us from Brooklyn (where we want to go) to Staten Island.  Yes we were safer (define that) and we had much more space to run around in, but were the schools actually better?  I guess it really all depends on what you want from a school?  This is something I keep trying to define.  What do I want from my son’s school?  What do I want for my son’s education?  Will I find it? Do I know too much?  Does that hurt me?

I don’t know but I do know that if my husband and I don’t ask these questions, one of the most precious gifts we can give him, the one thing I feel I can do really right, will not be good enough.