Midweek linkery

[oursin]

Theme going on here:

Joan Bakewell explains why we need mature women on our screens:
One entire segment of the public - women over 55 - never see their like on serious programming. They may be part of the content - victims of crime, sufferers from disease or lottery winners, but they are never there as the professional equivalent of older men.

Comments

[cassandre]

I think one should go to school to learn

Hear, hear. For all sorts of reasons I'm hoping that the local primary school across the street will work out for my Charlie (he starts next year), but I recoil at the notion that children must attend School X in order to reflect their parents' politics. Surely it's all about the particular child's needs, the particular context, etc, etc? I will do everything in my power to help my kid thrive in state school, but if s/he isn't thriving, I'm going to explore all the other options too - that's my responsibility as a parent.

Sadly, I was a lot more keen on sending Charlie to a state school "all the way through" until I had the experience of sitting on an interview committee at an Oxford college this year. Overall, the private school kids were so much more articulate and better-prepared. It was really depressing. My gut feeling is still that the home environment counts the most, but as I said, I'm going to try to stay open-minded and see how things unfold as Charlie grows up.

The socialization issue is complex. I was homeschooled all the way to university and it was an academic success and a social disaster. However, I suspect the latter was less due to homeschooling per se and more due to my, ahem, crazy parents. Certainly there are many human beings who emerge from state schools and are less than perfectly socialized.

I have just friended you - I grew up in northern Cal. (Eureka and Oroville) and *heart* the Pacific Northwest.

[serrana]

*snerk* See, I'm probably my kids' crazy antisocial parent. My parents were great believers in the "we'll put her in school, and she'll have to learn to be social," thing, and...er. That was, perhaps, less than effective.

We're homeschooling this year, after abortive attempts to do various other things (we may get to join a class-action lawsuit against our local school district! Whee!)

Part of why we left California was that I was judging elementary school science fairs and said, wow, there's no way I could put my kids in a classroom where they think this is work to be proud of. No. But then we came up here, and the school test scores are better, but the school politics? Just as vile.