"She is going to experience terrible circumstances, terrible people, terrible events and have terrible feelings arise. Avoiding discussing what is uncomfortable and scares us, doesn't protect us from it, it makes us even more reactive to it."
My wife has been awfully worried about growing concerns in the school system and the prospect of violence/mass casualty events. Due to the nature of my job, I study the events and prepare for worst case scenarios all of the time. I get anxious in crowds always looking for atypical or "red flag" behavior. I do my best to not take it home. I try to tell her that no matter what we do, we cannot protect our kids from everything. We can only hope to teach them to deal with situations on their own and hopefully make the right choices.
She really wants to do home school. I'm torn about it. I'm less worried about the violence issue, and more worried about the failings of public schooling built to "save" the least able student. (I remember being incredibly bored with redundancy at a certain age and basically checked out mentally.) In any case, I'm also worried that my kid is going to miss out on important social learning from his peers. Everything seems like the most important thing ever at a young age. Those situations stick with you and shape you. The dynamics of generational social contexts is going to be something I won't be able to teach because I'm disconnected from learning in that critical period which is dictated by the current environment.
This, and what they teach. They are teaching children to be more incompetent emotionally, as well as more reactive to their emotions.
If you do choose to homeschool, there are quite a lot of people now who do it, and they connect up for social activities in the neighborhood. It is almost like they are making a school system again...
Yeah I've seen some in my area. Sometimes I cringe at the "classes" that are offered. However, I've also thought I could teach a bunch of kids this stuff and make it fun for them. I've made some great strides in my collegiate scientific endeavors recently, but one of the coolest things I do there is occasionally teach high school kids human anatomy in the cadaver lab. It's fun watching them squirm looking at donor organs for the first time. Maybe there's some teaching in my future. I've really been enjoying research though, even choosing to step away from my job in a week or two to take a cool 10-week research opportunity. Kind of scary, but we'll see how it goes.