Stronger Together
Is public schooling a partnership? Does the establishment reflect your morals, your values, and your sense of what it is important for your children to know, believe, and become?
Most Americans have come to think of education as an essential governmental service, but if it is a service we are entitled to, it is an odd one in terms of determining who will provide the material and who will call the tune. In Plato’s Republic, the children of the guardian class are removed from their parents at birth and given to the state. Plato’s point seems to have been that private family loyalty is a rival to the common good. In America, schooling begins at the age of five, but Americans, in their individualism, once contended that they have children, they employ the teachers, and they will judge what they ought or ought not to know. Only more recently has this been something they were content to turn over to the experts, and to stay out of the classrooms.
Ridgeview’s contention has been that parents are an integral and indispensable part of what constitutes a child’s education. Henry Ward Beecher famously said, “What the mother sings to the cradle goes all the way down to the coffin,” and the American poet William Ross Wallace wrote in 1865 that, “For the hand that rocks the cradle / is the hand that rules the world.” If schools can complement motherhood, or parents more generally, they are indeed a service. It is in how they are chosen and their manner of association with parents that bears close scrutiny. For Ridgeview, it is imperative that we were chosen by you. That choice is your express consent. The tacit version of that consent, which millions of people live with presumably because it is better than staying home with their children, or their children having no education, or perhaps most oddly, because their children would otherwise have nothing to eat, looks like having one’s education dictated to them by the happenstance of where they live and what a majority of their fellows decided was best for their children to know, believe, and become. That is an abdication and a dereliction. It is the turning over of a gift not given by government to be tutored and formed by government.
The express alternative that we promote and recommend requires real work. For the parent, it begins by making an informed choice. In order to have any chance of being able to be informed, you must have access to real information. You must be able to know what the curriculum consists of, who your children’s teachers are, what they will study, what will be expected of them, what values the school promotes, what actually occurs inside of a classroom or on an outdoor trip, and what the culture of the place is.
Ridgeview wants you on its campus, in our classrooms, and fully participating in the life of our school. We do not believe that we are a substitute for your parental authority. At our best, we are a complement to it. In order for you to be sure of us, we want you to know what your children are reading and studying, we want for you to visit our classrooms and provide our teachers with feedback, we want for you to help your children with their homework, to make use of tutorials when necessary, and to unembarrassedly reach out when you have questions. We want for you to help chaperone field trips and outdoor outings, and to mingle with other parents at reading groups. While we would be delighted to have some grandiose campus, we even want you to sit in our hallways and read to elementary students and listen to them read to you. We want for you to help out with plays, concerts, dances, and musicals—we want for you to experience Ridgeview the reality, not Ridgeview the show. We want for you to know your children’s teachers, not just at conferences, but to know where they struggle and where they flourish, and to meet with your child’s chambers advisors and know that a childhood is about much more than what is in the gradebook. We want for you to sit with us in reading groups, to ask questions at a coffee, even to attend a board meeting, and we want most of all for you to become a part of what makes Ridgeview successful.
That express consent does not just happen once. It is almost impossible to be at Ridgeview passively. Your consent is renewed daily by participation, contribution, and by living a life that does not communicate to students that this is one place and all of life another. The American philosopher Eric Hoffer observed that, “Animals can learn, but it is not by learning that they become dogs, cats, or horses. Only man has to learn to become what he is supposed to be.” The mindset by which we go about life must permeate a part of us in everything we come to. As parents, we can either be cultivators or inheritors. The tacit inherit someone else’s version of what a person should be; the express assert the right to shape the environment in which their successors learn what to know, believe, and become.
The technologies that have slowly eroded our face-to-face interactions produce too little opportunity for conversation, camaraderie, and fellowship. Giving your children the most of this opportunity necessitates your involvement, but it is a happy necessity because whether you’ve taken advantage of it or not, it is involvement in a community that wants you here. Join us.
D. Anderson
Headmaster
