The last few days I have been wondering how to move forward in a positive direction without hurting the day care or the public school system in which I have invested a lot. I have been at school for social events, a meeting, parent conferences, drop-off and pickup. Anywhere I go around town I meet people from school. These things remind me daily of the benefits of public school, and of the challenges. While what I want to do with children is in part a reaction to things I don’t like about public school today, like silly homework, sitting still, rushed meals, too much time inside, and MCAS exams, my worries about what I envision as an alternatvive also have a lot to do with what I love about school, like getting to know families in my city, those like myself and those who are different, having a wide range of role models for my kids, having a separate space where my kids feel at home and time when they don’t need me, books and ideas from outside our world coming to the kids from all the other kids and adults at school, free music lessons and citywide concerts in the high school auditorium where I am in an audience of families from around the world, a playground full of kids running around together after school, big kids organizing events for younger kids, a huge cafeteria full of people who are all connected. I love being part of that. I love that everyone can be part of it.

Leaving that part of public school behind is hard. It is hard to leave it even for the utopian vision of kids following their interests all day, interacting comfortably with kids and adults of many ages as they wish, eating and relaxing and playing according to a comfortable rhythm, spending time outside and around town, living and learning in comfy spaces, focussing as much on physical and social and emotional and artistic development as on literacy and mathematical development. I wonder if the tradeoffs are worthwhile, if the vision could include more of the good stuff of public school that seems so hard to leave behind, if others will find breaking with public school a smart move, even if I take the plunge, if I will miss my community there, or even be excluded. And if others join us, will we pull away families or kids whose contributions might enrich the public schools and is that a reason not to go forward?

I even wonder about the not so glamorous stuff. Does making it in public school give kids a resilience they would not get otherwise? Does it give them an insight into people and economics and society that might not be obvious in other settings? Does the unfairness they experience, whether in economic differences or the way discipline is handled or the way kids who learn differently are treated, make them want to fight for justice?  And while many schools are pretty segregated by race and class and other things, does a reasonably integrated school system give kids a comfort level with people different from themselves that is hard to replace in other settings?

When I answer these questions with an answer that makes me want to move forward in creating an alternative, I think, “Children have basic rights to freedom, to learning that is developmentally and individually appropriate, to respect, to access to the outdoors and the community, to explore what interests and is important to them. If we could create a place that more fully realizes those rights, it would be worth doing. And hopefully, if we could do that, we could include anyone who wanted to come, and our work would add energy to the larger movement to address the basic rights of all people.” When I answer these questions with an answer that worries me, I think, “Jonathan Kozol is right. Creating something wonderful for a small group of children does nothing for the rest of the children who have no access to it. And, it might in fact take the small group of children and their families out of a situation in which they would learn more about addressing the larger issues.”