Is your school in conflict with your values?
Cold and remote, Bergen is the perfect summer vacation destination…for some. (Image by nextvoyage from Pixabay)
I’ve heard a few different versions of the same story now:
“You get written up at my daughter’s school if you’re not wearing a belt! You get in trouble if you walk too close to the wall in the hallway. We’re frustrated with these rules and we’ve talked to them about finding ways that she can have more creative expression at school, but nothing seems to change.”
No, nothing will change. This is exactly what happens when there’s a mismatch of values between you and the private school you’ve chosen for your child.
By maintaining such rules, the school is saying exactly what it values. It’s telling you what it cares about and how the students must behave to be in alignment with that. If it doesn’t work for you, the solution is not to ask the school to operate in conflict with their values. Is the choose a different school.
How do you spot this before it becomes a problem? It’s important to consider what your own values are. What do you care about? How do you measure a good life? What do you want your children to understand and believe about the world?
Before I put the work into this myself, I had thought of my values simply as “the right way to do things.” Upon deeper reflection, I realized that my values were simply mine, and everyone else got to make their own choices about what they prioritize. Some people want to live five minutes from Target. Some people want to live five minutes from a beach where they can watch the sun rise every morning. Some people choose their children’s activities; some people wait for their children to express interest in activities before they enroll them.
One could argue the merits of these different approaches, but that would be beside the point. If we live in a free society, we all get to choose, and live in accordance with, our own values. And it’s far easier to affiliate with organizations that are in alignment with those values than it is to try to change the organizations themselves.
For instance, if it’s very important to you that your child’s education be in alignment with your religious beliefs, public school is not a good choice. Public school has a very important job. It feeds breakfast and lunch to children who otherwise would not have these meals. It teaches English to those who who do not have exposure to this language at home. It is free to those who attend, and is open to all. As an institution that must, by law, welcome students of all backgrounds, it is not in a position to offer a moral education or espouse a particular set of religious beliefs over another.
Likewise, a parochial school would go against its purpose if it presented an unbiased take on morals and religion, or if it were to change its curriculum and programming to accommodate the beliefs of a different religion or philosophy, or those of a specific family.
Expecting your school to bend to your values is to set yourself up for disappointment. It would be better to choose a school already in harmony with your values. Better yet, start one.
In a situation where choices do not seem to exist, The Rulerless School is there to step into the gap by providing an individualized education for your child. But even though we offer a custom program, we have a point of view. We have our own set of values that may or may not work for you. We don’t have grades. We don’t compare students to each other. We give students many opportunities to learn material. We are light on homework and heavy on positive reinforcement.
Believe it or not, each of these choices is controversial. There are people who vehemently disagree with every aspect of what we’re doing. In a way, that tells us that we’re on the right track. If everyone were on board with what we’re doing, then we would not have an identity. People wouldn’t be able to tell whether our values fit with theirs, so they might simply project their own values onto us. This would set up a conflict, because a mismatch is likely. That’s because it’s impossible to have no values; to have no values means only that your values are unexamined and you assume them to be universal truth.
When you begin to think about what you care about and what you value, it illumines new possibilities even as it eliminates others. You will find yourself and your children leading a more satisfying and intentional life based on what you believe, not just what’s in front of you.
Even if you can’t make school choices based on your values, at least you’ll understand that there’s nothing wrong with the school or your child. There are simply the choices we all make about what we invest in, what we care about, and what we believe.