By Susan Brady

When my children were young, my only thought to their future was that they be happy, healthy, and productive members of the community. I was thinking on a larger, global scale, which I think most of us tend to do when their children are still drooling and wearing diapers. As my children got older, and began elementary school, it seems that my thoughts became more focused and that my vision of their future clarified in my mind. I began to impart the importance of education, guiding them along the path that I felt would best suit their adult lives, which included graduating from high school and attending a four-year college. Not that my children needed to be a doctor or lawyer. I would be perfectly content if they were a chef, a mechanic, or a circus clown. But I knew the wisdom of obtaining a high school diploma, as well as the mind-expanding joys of college away from home. I made sure my kids knew that, too.

I started working on them young. They attended small, public parent-participation elementary schools, where I volunteered weekly—in the classroom, on committees, in the office, writing grants—and I extolled the virtues of learning. They enjoyed the small-school atmosphere, the personalization of projects, and being on a first-name basis with teachers and peers alike. They learned to take responsibility and participate on student-led committees to make school rules, to solve problems, to suggest curriculum. They became creative, strong individuals.

I helped with homework, made sure we had art supplies, a computer, and reference books galore. Every summer I home-schooled with reading, writing, and arithmetic on the agenda, as well as art, silly poetry, and trips to the zoo. I balanced out the education with gymnastics, soccer, baseball, ballet, Girl Scouts, summer camp. In short, I tried to give them a well-rounded education for mind and body.

It all went reasonably well…until high school. High school is where they hit the big time. My daughter went from a graduating class of 6 to a freshman class of 500, and a school of over 2,000, and had become nameless, faceless, and clueless. Not to mention, scared shitless. It was all I could do to get her to go to school those first few weeks. The first two years were torture for her and her grades were abysmal. Many teary days and nights passed by. She finally turned it around in her junior year and we began to focus on college. Her whole junior year she insisted she was going to stay at home and go to a junior college. It took a full year to convince her to apply to four-year colleges. We made the campus tours, she read the brochures, did research on-line, and managed to get some good SAT scores to build her confidence. She compromised and applied to schools within four hours of home, so she had a weekend escape route, if necessary. And after an emotional high school graduation, we sent her off to the big leagues, where she has blossomed and experienced life and success.

Where I really ran into the problem, where I really realized that my vision for my children’s future had to be examined, is with my son. Given that he is an entirely different individual than my daughter, I had placed him in a traditional school setting when he began junior high school. He liked the larger school, the extracurricular activities, the social atmosphere. Personally, he thrived. Scholastically, he just about failed.

I put a renewed energy into his education once he hit high school. Although he was not bothered by the transition to the larger school, he was bothered by the teacher’s attitudes, the lack of creativity, and the impersonal nature that a large suburban high school tends to present to its student body. The first two years he was faithful about attending class, about participating, and in taking tests. What he failed to do, in large quantities, was the homework. He began to dislike reading, to detest the mimeographed handouts that had been a part of the curriculum for twenty years, to rebel against rote and non-creative tasks dreamed up by staff members long dead. His grades suffered as a consequence. He was forced to sit out a whole soccer season when he neglected the homework.

I don’t mean to say he wasn’t learning, because in actuality he was learning. He just wasn’t learning the way that the school wanted and expected him to. He knew the material, he could pass the tests, spell the words, write a paper. But many of today’s high schools have learned to cater to something other than education. It isn’t enough to learn anymore. Now you have to produce, in mass quantities, sometimes inane homework to prove that you will be a good employee some day. The high schools claim they are helping out local employers and providing them with what they have asked for. Funny how that wasn’t the case when I went to high school. And I think I turned out pretty darn good.

Consequently, my son has become frustrated and bored with the traditional educational system. I seem him skipping class on occasion—not enough to fail through inattendance, or enough to get him grounded for weeks at a time, but enough to keep himself happy and unencumbered by the system he has come to hate. All attempts I have made over the last three years with teachers, guidance counselors, principals, have left me as frustrated as he is. Teachers who don’t know his name four months into the school year, who have no interest in working with me to help my child succeed, administrators who actually suggest that I let him fail.

I am faced with the fact that those early visions, of high school graduation and four-year colleges, are not a reality with my son. I have learned to joke with friends, telling them I just hope he graduates, forget about honors, scholarships, four-year colleges for now.

Amongst all this, I ask myself what I have done wrong, or what I could have done better. And for all its faults, and although the local school system has failed my son, I know their system works for many kids. And then there is the subject of my son, quite an adult, intelligent being, who maybe didn’t see the wisdom of the schooling early on, who didn’t want to "play the game," who now really wants to learn, but in a more creative, personalized environment. I find myself seeking out alternatives, so that he is not totally turned off by the educational system and will want to continue. I research the requirements of obtaining a GED, maybe allowing him to skip his senior year, and go straight to a junior college. I look into a Middle College program at our local junior college, which would combine his senior year with college classes. I even contemplate home schooling for his senior year.

Whatever path my son elects, I have learned to admit that it will stray from my vision. But it was just that, my vision. A vision dreamed up when they were riding tricycles and building sand castles. Now they are on the brink of adulthood, and they need to find their own vision. I am confident that eventually he will earn his diploma, and that eventually he will attend a four-year college. I have accepted that and I am not disappointed that he didn’t follow the path that I had laid out for him (after many tears, many discussions, and too many sleepless nights). My lesson here is that each child must own up to their own strengths and weaknesses and make decisions that are right for themselves. I know that it was okay for me to provide summer education, and volunteer in classrooms, and verbalize the importance of education. I see that my children value that dedication, and realize (maybe better late than never) the impact that education will have on the rest of their lives, and that they need to find a way to that end that works for them.

And regardless of the outcome of all of this, my original hopes and dreams for my son, as well as my daughter, that they become happy, healthy, and productive members of society, is in no danger. I have remarkable faith in both of them, in their ability to live a good life, and make good decisions.

Susan Brady is a typical suburban soccer mom, whose unusual career path has taken her from birthing babies at an alternative birthing center to birthing books as the production director for a travel publisher. She lives in the San Francisco Bay Area.