School’s out

My daughter was, on the second day of her last year at primary school, placed into (shock-horror) a composite year 5-6 class.

I got an early whiff of the issue when I received a fairly defensive email from the principal early on in the day. I thought ‘that’s odd’ but was too busy to think about it properly at the time.

And then I got a phone call from my daughter’s mother – my daughter had been placed in a composite class and all the similarly ‘affected’ parents were already organizing themselves in protest to fix the problem. We had to attend a parent’s meeting – the People’s Front of Clovelly (or was it the Clovelly’s People Front?).

My only awareness of composite classes was that they are endemic in country schools. I had no awareness that your average suburban primary school also has them. It makes sense though; in the case of my daughter’s school, enough kids had been sucked out to a final primary year in prep schools for private high schools to give them a numbers headache only solvable by creating a composite class.

Now I am an experienced business investor and entrepreneur and we all know never to trust our intuition on a subject that we know nothing about.

So I called my sister-in-law, a primary school principal, for the facts.

The take home message was that (a) the school probably had no choice, (b) academic outcomes are usually not affected by composite classes so long as an appropriately skilled teacher is picked, and (c) there can be some social skills benefits not usually afforded to kids in a non-composite classes.

In addition, the alternative choice, taking my daughter out of the school, which her mother had suggested, was certain to have negative outcomes. As was forcing her way into the monolithic year 6 class simply because Lola does not gel with the teacher, who is a blunter.

On balance this was a non-issue for me after five minutes of learning and thinking.

I accidentally ran into one of the other fathers and found myself unwillingly convincing him; this took half an hour.

Then I spent five very unfortunate minutes not convincing my daughter’s maternal grandmother who has a social standing to consider, and saw yet another opportunity to get my daughter into the private school system

The mother? I told her what I thought and why. I got her to ring my sister-in-law. Who knows. My guess she will swing this way and that and eventually do nothing.

The whole saga does highlight a few issues that have been bugging me for a while now:

1. The overwhelming sense of entitlement of parents – in their minds the school system is there to serve their demands. In essence, they are paying (hardly in the case of the public system) for something that matters a lot to them and they demand outcomes. This sense of entitlement extends to their kids – they see them as chattel that they can force into the sausage machine, not individual humans that they need to nurture until they, the children, find their own paths.

2. The outcomes that the parents desire is the best possible schooling opportunities for their children. Why? Well I think it’s because they want their kids to have as much status and earn as much money as possible in this competitive system of ours. But behind this, of course, is the parent’s own need for confirmation of their own status in our society. What better than a well-performing child to validate one’s own sense of worth?

3. All of this must end in tears for a lot of kids, but much later in life. Groomed for wealth production and entry into circles of like-minded networks of the deluded, there can be little room for them to follow their own paths, nor to grow into holistic and mindful human beings.

4. My, how people take themselves so seriously!