School Daze

Recently, yet another article appeared in a local newspaper labeling our education system inferior and obsolete.

Now, I know people have been saying that our schools are going to pot and other hallucinogenic drugs, and that they spawn illiterates who can barely read their own protest signs, while all over the world little Russian girls spout formulae in nuclear physics and little Chinese boys air theories in advanced thermonuclear dynamics. I’ll admit that none of my children can divide by nine, and that I get letters from summer camp whose spelling couldn’t be deciphered by the CIA.

But when I think of how faithfully each year, on the first day after Labor Day, our schools open their doors to every child in the country over five, my heart overflows with gratitude and I’m perfectly willing to overlook any small imperfections in the education system.

You see, the fact that sticks in my mind above all else is that come September (with due allowances for religious holidays and teachers’ conventions), the children won’t be in my kitchen making hand puppets out of all my garbage bags; they’ll be taken out of my hair and into the school system for at least five hours a day by the gallant men and women who teach in our public schools.

I say at least five hours a day. If I’m really lucky, one of my kids will develop a behavior problem or a tendency to fail in arithmetic. Then, what with detentions and extra help in long division, she might not get home until it’s time to give her her supper and put her to bed.

If I could only convince her to join the Latin Club and play the recorder in the school orchestra, it just might be possible to keep her shut up in that schoolhouse from sunrise to sunset.

Our youngest daughter goes to school half days only, but any mother will agree that a morning away from a five-year-old is like a month in Miami. The baby doesn’t go to school at all, but with the other three out of the house, there’s only one of him and one of me, and with those odds, even I can cope.

The trouble is, children don’t know what to do with leisure time. Torn from their orderly routine, they lie around all day in their pajamas working peanut butter into the dining room rug and whining that they have nothing to do. They have enough toys to stock a small department store, every one of which has been strewn around the living room for the past two months. Each child has her own bedroom and there’s a playroom in the basement, but when we suggest that they go there, we’re greeted with such howls of indignation, you’d think we were trying to ship them off to Vladivostok for the winter.

To top it all off, they got sick. All of them, at once. Now, I’m used to sickness. It’s been my proud boast that in the first ten years of motherhood I never had a child out of diapers or off medication. But when they’re all sick at the same time, it takes something out of you. The trice daily line-ups for medicine look like clinic calls at summer camp, and the constant steam from the vaporizers gives the entire house the aura of a prosperous shirt laundry.

Ah, the relief, when they finally go back to school! Telephones, doorbells, television sets and refrigerator doors settle into their normal cacophonous routine. I serve a mere five or six meals a day, instead of one continuous unending banquet. It will probably take me only three or four months to catch up on my laundry, ironing, mending, dirty dishes and housecleaning. In other words, just in time to greet the little darlings when they start their Christmas vacation.