Education in Child Raising

 

My goals in raising my daughter:

• I wanted her to be a healthy, happy independent adult for her own sake,
• Creating a responsible, well educated citizen. The school system was a major concern.

As a child when we moved to West Virginia, my mother shocked at the deficiency of the public schools and put me in a private school. Although I hated it, I covered four years of work in two, helped by my grandmother drilling me in times tables, spelling and content of other subjects. We then moved back to Massachusetts.

 

Massachusetts had and has good schools. Depending on the source they are usually rated between number one and five. Quality varies from town to town.

 

When we moved to Boston, I was faced with the same dilemma my mother was faced with in West Virginia only with the Boston schools which were not as good as other towns and had many political problems. Before I enrolled her in a private school,she took the exam for Boston Latin School. It was founded in 1635 with a reputation for excellence. They post presidents, famous musicians, Nobel price winner, writers, philosophers and more in their graduates.

 

At one point both my daughter and my roommate, who was going for her degree, were reading the same writers. We had a celebration cake when they finished Hemingway's Old Man and the Sea, a book they both hated.

 

I still felt I needed to supplement her education. She remembers that I had her write essays. I don't remember that, but sometimes when we start the "do you remember" game our memories would make someone believe I did not raise her and she didn't have me for a mother because those memories vary so much.

 

She needed to be exposed to history by visiting famous places in Europe and the U.S., frequent museums, theater, concerts etc. Political discussions and current events were part of some dinner conversations along with anything else under the sun. And of course, we did the amusement parks, skating rinks, and all sorts of things.

 

As for reading, Friday night visits to Harvard Square to load up on the week's reading, listen to the street museums and find a good restaurant was called Family Night. 

 

Boston Latin required students to read ten books from a list of 100 each summer and they were tested on them.

 

Reading was not a hardship for my daughter. I joked I could have saved a fortune on day care by dropping her off in a children's book department along with a sandwich and a carton of juice. She would never have noticed I was gone.

 

If this blog sounds as if we were rich, we weren't. Money was tight a good part of my daughter's childhood. My beloved stepmom asked why I bought a used fridge, and my reply was the difference was going into savings for a trip to Europe. Financial Scroogedom was part of my daughter's education.

 

A good part of her undergraduate degree was done in Germany and her masters in Scotland at a fraction of the cost.  

 

My daughter today is a well educated, well adjusted, adult, responsible to herself and her society. She visits me in France when she can, the last time this spring for three weeks. The next is being planned. We share so many things, including recipes, walks, stories, café sits, dreams, plans, regular messages and thanks to the internet regular chats ... anything that hits our fancy.

 

Over the years we've gone to various demonstrations, a memory we recreated when she was with me in Switzerland. She and I went to Bern to protest the Iraq War following a good meal of Wurstsalat.

 

I am grateful that I lived in a time and place where I could provide for her. I didn't have to worry about banned books, or fake history about happy slaves as pushed by the Prager who slants history materials.