Jan 31
I’m sitting at my desk and I’m watching a neighbor boy walk off to school. It is about 29 degrees this morning. He has no coat on. Why? Not because he prefers it cold. But because his school provides no place for him to stash it. No locker. Rather that truck a coat around all day, he dresses for inside the school on the outside walk.
One of my biggest complaints about our public schools is that they are run as huge bureaucracies operating for the benefit of teachers and administrators more than for the students. Lockers give administrators a headache. So the schools have none.
But they do have kids arriving very cold.
I can tell you one school that operates with the kids as the focus… The Nelson Home School.
January 31st, 2011 at 11:52 am
Modern expectations: locker at school. I survived private high school that had no lockers without harm from exposure which would have killed me at -15F. Whether home school is a good, or merely a necessary, solution depends on the circumstances and the alternatives. The Internet at least makes it a more attractive choice than was available to me.
PS: Parents also give schools a headache. If lockers give schools a problem, the parents resist the taxes that would pay for doing the amenity right.
January 31st, 2011 at 12:55 pm
Schools, actually, are often designed for the parents work schedules more than educational benefit.
January 31st, 2011 at 1:51 pm
i don’t see to many kids frozen along the side of the road like statues, especially in St. George. Lockers are great places for contraband, and kids love to go back and forth to them between classes, thus ensuring they will be late to every class.
Lots to complain about with schools, but no lockers seems like the least of it.
Dress in layers. Put shed layers in a backpack.
January 31st, 2011 at 2:40 pm
Public school schedules were originally set to fit education into farm labor demands. The rich kids went to boarding school.
January 31st, 2011 at 5:15 pm
So you’re saying they should start later in the day when it’s warmer? Then parents will whine that its too hot for little Johnny come April and May. Plus it will cut into their soccer practice, but certainly not into study time, according to that international test they released results of a couple of months ago.
January 31st, 2011 at 6:52 pm
No offense #3… but you are part of the system that lockers inconvenience. So they don’t have them.
It isn’t lockers per se, but how the decisions are made I was questioning. Is anybody truly questioning that large school systems set policy to benefit their administrators and/or union employees first?
That educational merit, when mentioned at all, is last or used as a prop for something desired for other reasons (i.e. pay raises or take home cars?).
February 1st, 2011 at 8:51 am
So, who should write the rules for school operation: the taxpayers who provide the money, the administrators who operate the institution, the teachers who do the educating, or the parents who send their their children to be educated? Each of these groups would like to write the rules to make their roles easier. And each thinks the other groups have too much influence. Just the ripe situation for endless blogging and carping.
February 1st, 2011 at 10:26 am
Well…. I’d not have the system in the first place. There, carping over.
Or do you refer more to carping about blogging?