(GLO — March 2010 — This actually became law in Colorado last year, with its proponents heralding that now “parents didn’t have to choose between being good parents and good employees”. Heavy sigh. Government schooling cutting itself more favours… akin to how they don’t have to consider road safety when they position schools and leave out parking lanes or parking lots that would relieve daily traffic jams. There are ways for schoolers to go to parents — see KIPP — if they wish to be bothered, and there are ways to cover the distance separating parents ‘n schools via technology. Legislation of this nature basically forces business of all kinds to conform and pay in lost labour of their own for the unbudging collectivized hours and labour clauses of government schooling. It is government schooling bullying business and community, to make itself feel better and excuse itself for being unable to genuinely serve or solve on its own the problems of its own creation. Spinning deeper down its own vortex.)
On the cover of the Denver Daily News from February 10, 2009 (that I literally found lying around a friend’s house here in Calgary recently) was a headline story describing legislation moving through the Colorado state legislature that would require businesses to allow parents up to 18 hours time off from work per year so they can attend their children’s school activities. This is frightening to me on a couple different levels.
Yes, it is helpful for parents to be involved with their children’s schools. But in no way should it be mandatory, and in no way should anyone other than the multi-multi-billion-dollar government school industry have to incent or fund such involvement.
It is MUCH more important that parents be involved with their CHILDREN, and their children’s schooling. That can be done PLENTY without ever having to attend at their children’s school. Studies in the New England area established years back that parents who may never be seen around a school are very likely involving themselves in their children’s schooling in many positive ways… the simplest and most important of ways being to regularly ask “How was your day at school today? Tell me something you learned.”
But more than overstating the importance of parents actually attending at their children’s schools… overstating it to the extreme that employers should facilitate it… is the frightening inequity in what such legislation would require employers to give up relative to how little schooling gives up of its taxpayer dollars to make parent involvement happen. If similar legislation were to be dreamed up in Alberta, that 18 hours per year multiplied by about one million parents of Alberta schoolchildren multiplied by a conservative $20 per hour is an “involuntary contribution” by business of $360 million per year! That’s $360 per parent, when schooling itself invests only about 50 cents in each of them from a co-educator training point of view, and maybe two bucks overall (with the rest just aimed at helping parents be better meeting goers and fundraisers).
Holy Do As I Say, Not As I Do, Batman!
If employers are to accept any kind of mandate to support parents in their children’s schooling of that magnitude, shouldn’t government schooling itself have to match a little more than one-half of one percent?
GLO
gordotto@parentsnschools.com
– Share with a Friend —