At a birthday party a week or so ago (my interactions with other adults pretty much center around birthday parties), a friend of mine who’s the mom of one of Sophia’s best friends confided in me that she’s not happy with our preschool. Why? Because it’s not academic enough. Her daughter doesn’t know her letters yet, for example.

I confided in her that I’m not happy with the preschool because I think it’s too academic. I think the school spends an inordinate amount of time on letters. Sophia already knew her alphabet and numbers before going to preschool, you see. Her preschool in LA was (dare I say it) more perfect than I knew at the time. She’d come home covered in paint and dirt, having spent all day doing art projects and feeding the pet rabbit and listening to stories in circle time. At her current preschool her clothes are in perfect order every day.

Sophia’s big thing these days is writing. She can write her name and Simon’s name; she has to ask me to spell other names. For example, now when we write out a birthday card, Sophia insists on writing the name of her friend on the card and signing it herself. She isn’t reading (so far as I know), but she can write pretty well for a 4-year-old. (In my opinion, of course. What do I know of the handwriting skills of 4 year olds?)

At a birthday party this past weekend, I met a mom who turns out to live very close to me, whose son is going to the public school my kids would attend. As is my wont, I talked to her some about what the school’s like, and as usually happens I probably took something different away from her words than she intended. She liked the kindergarten teacher, but is not so thrilled with her son’s 1st grade teacher this year. (The school year is what, a month old? And already she’s not thrilled?) The constant fundraising appeals (on top of the gigantic property taxes we’re all paying in this area). The way parents are continuously on call to help out with teaching art or science, or arranging parties, or coordinating field trips.

My thought as she was saying all this was, “If I have to do all that, I might as well just keep ’em home.”

Which is a really frightening idea to me still.

I’m not much worried about Sophia’s socialization—when she wants to play with other kids, she’s the belle of the playground and directs all the action. When she doesn’t, she sits by herself and refuses all interactions. And while I’m not too certain of Simon’s style of interaction (he’s still at an age where kids play near one another and not so much with one another), I know so far that he’s a pretty sunny kid who’s very bright, both personality-wise and intelligence-wise.

No, I’m going to be out-and-out selfish here and admit that the Number One reason I wouldn’t homeschool is I am afraid I would not have any time to myself during the day, and I really, really need time to myself. One of the early indicators to me that Darin and I were well-suited was that I could stand to be around him for more than three or four hours straight.

But then I read something Sarah’s essay on why she homeschools, and I’m like, Yeah, I’m down with that. Not that I was ever “warehoused” in my schooling, the way I’ve read so many other people were. But I definitely disliked the social aspects of school (the really bright kids, especially when they’re over a year younger than everyone else in the class? not very popular). I got into the habit of making myself appear stupider than I really was. I remember one time I was in a discussion with a couple of people on some topic and I said, “Gosh, I don’t know,” when I clearly did. And after everyone else left, my friend Fritz said to me, “I know you knew what they were talking about.” Of course, he’d acted stupid about it too.

Mind you, we were at Stanford at the time.

If you have to act stupid at Stanford, there’s a problem.

I’d really like my kids to have the experience of enjoying being intelligent and being able to read as much as they want to whenever they want to. That was certainly the best part of any day for me.

But I’m worried too that I would not be able to make time for myself. Maybe it’s easier to do when they get older, I don’t know. But I’m still thinking about it.

There was a nice op-ed in the LA Times yesterday by Walt Gardner pointing out that the halcyon golden age of schooling is, in fact, a total myth:

With the fall semester underway across the country, it won’t be long before critics of public education emerge again to wax nostalgic about the better schooling of the past. These sentimentalists yearn for a return to the golden age of education, when we were proud of our schools and what they accomplished.

The trouble is that there never was such an educational Eden. Ever since public schools have existed in this country, they’ve been the subject of complaints that sound very much like those heard today. A fast rewind through the decades serves as an instructive lesson.

As early as 1845, criticism of public schools centered on, of all things, standardized test scores. The first standardized test in the United States was administered in Boston to a group of elite students known as brag scholars. Despite their storied reputation, only 45% of these test takers knew, for example, that water expands when it freezes. Horace Mann, Massachusetts’ secretary of public instruction, was so distressed by their performance that he berated schools for ignoring higher-order thinking skills in favor of rote memorization.

In 1909, Ellwood Cubberly, dean of the Stanford School of Education, bemoaned the inability of American students to function in an ever-more-interdependent world economy. He believed that this shortcoming posed a threat to the nation. During World War I, more than half of Army recruits were unable to write a letter or read a newspaper with ease, prompting officers to question the job that schools were doing.

The National Assn. of Manufacturers charged in 1927 that 40% of high school students couldn’t perform simple arithmetic or accurately express themselves in English. It decried the burden these deficits imposed on employers.

In 1943 the New York Times designed a social studies test, which it gave to 7,000 college freshmen nationwide. Only 29% knew that St. Louis was on the Mississippi River. Many thought that Abraham Lincoln was the first president. The Times concluded that its test results reflected the shoddiness of instruction, which focused on low standards and expectations.

But nothing came close to matching the attack of “A Nation at Risk” in 1983. The Reagan administration-commissioned report alleged that “a rising tide of mediocrity” characterized public education. It vastly overrated the threat to our economy’s preeminence, as time has shown, but its conclusion is still recited as a mantra by many otherwise knowledgeable people.

What these persistent charges underscore is that dissatisfaction with public schools is nothing new. What is different today, however, is the thinly veiled hostility that pervades the latest attack in the form of the No Child Left Behind Act of 2002. Despite its noble-sounding title, the Bush administration’s basic educational initiative goes far beyond its historical counterparts in its punitive approach. It contains a series of nonnegotiable demands that are impossible to meet even under ideal conditions.

By far the most draconian is the provision that by 2014, 100% of students at any public school must be proficient in reading and math on state-developed tests, or the school faces a takeover. If any subgroup — such as non-English-speaking or handicapped students — falls short, the entire school is declared to be failing. It makes no difference if the school has distinguished itself in any other way, including college acceptance rates. All that matters are scores on standardized tests.

At no time in American history has this goal been achieved. Nevertheless, the law is being promoted as the only way to get back to the days when schools were paragons of academic excellence. When was that?

Let’s repeat that one paragraph:

By far the most draconian is the [No Child Left Behind] provision that by 2014, 100% of students at any public school must be proficient in reading and math on state-developed tests, or the school faces a takeover. If any subgroup — such as non-English-speaking or handicapped students — falls short, the entire school is declared to be failing. It makes no difference if the school has distinguished itself in any other way, including college acceptance rates. All that matters are scores on standardized tests.

So in case you were wondering, yes, No Child Left Behind is designed deliberately to declare every single damn school in this nation as failing.

Or get schools to change their definitions of passing radically downward.

We have demanded the schools do something that has never happened in history, and do it in 11 years.

Yeah, I know: things can change. But the standardized tests are here to stay, as are the ridiculous demands by every segment of society. My head hurts. But not as much as my kids’ heads might eventually start to.

I still can’t quite wrap my mind around the contradictions of American education. We keep hearing about how lousy the schools are—except when they’re not, in which case they’re highly competitive and everybody’s killing themselves to get into college. Unless, of course, the colleges are killing themselves right back to get the students:

Whether evident in student unions, recreational centers or residence halls (please, do not call them dorms) the competition for students is yielding amenities once unimaginable on college campuses, spurring a national debate over the difference between educational necessity and excess.

Critics call them multimillion-dollar luxuries that are driving up university debts and inflating the cost of education. Colleges defend them as compulsory attractions in the scramble for top students and faculty, ignored at their own institutional peril. And somewhere in the middle sit those who have only one analogy for the building boom taking place.

“An arms race,” said Clare Cotton, president of the Association of Independent Colleges and Universities in Massachusetts. “It’s exactly the psychology of an arms race. From the outside it seems totally crazy, but from the inside it feels necessary and compelling.”

So, most of the schools in America are turning out lousy students—except there are enough good ones to justify these kind of country-club amenities?

I don’t understand this picture.