63. Is it too risky to do the right thing?
[From Seth Godin, Stop Stealing Dreams http://www.squidoo.com/stop-stealing-dreams]
Do parents mean well?
It’s about at this point in the discussion that parents get a bit squeamish. We all want the best for children—and many parents are willing to go to extraordinary lengths to get the best. We will hire tutors, track down better schools, fret over report cards, go to parent-teacher conferences, and drive ourselves crazy worrying about homework or the kind of felt used to complete a school project.
But the sanctity of performance/testing/compliance-based schooling is rarely discussed and virtually never challenged.
It’s crazy to imagine a suburban school district having serious talks about abandoning state standards, rejecting the SAT, or challenging the admissions criteria at famous colleges (more about famous in a minute).
There’s a myth at work here, one that cannot and will not be seriously questioned. The myth says:
Great performance in school leads to happiness and success.
And the corollary:
Great parents have kids who produce great performance in school.
It doesn’t matter that neither of these is true. What matters is that finding a path that might be better is just too risky for someone who has only one chance to raise his kids properly.
Tags: stopstealingdreams
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