My kid just turned three and, consequently, I’ve been touring pre-Ks. It can be hellish, especially when some of the tours are virtual and give you a feeling of digital nothingness. It can also be charming, such as when you get a glimpse of a really cute five-year-old seriously playing a game of chess while sitting on one of those little mini chairs.
But mostly, these tours make me feel like I don’t know what I’m doing as a parent, that there are 3,000 good ways to raise a child, but what if I pick the wrong ones?
At what point in elementary school will they start reading Descartes?
Modern parenting, it turns out, is hard. All of these fictional parents complaining on TV and in movies, all of these real parents kvetching about child-rearing on the news. I get it now. They aren’t exaggerating. It. Is. Hard.
These school tours also give us insight into what our aspirational society looks like. It’s as if the school is saying, “Look, we’ve got these three- and four-year-olds, they’re nuts right now and just learned about boogers, but they also exist in a kind of Rawlsian ‘original position’ where they haven’t been ethically tarnished yet. We have an opportunity to refashion society here, with these little kids and their still-chubby fingers.”
It’s a grand goal, a necessary one, and reason alone for why teachers aren’t paid enough.
What kind of society do we want to build for these preschoolers? The core mission of many of these public schools I’ve seen includes Inclusion, Kindness, Joy of Learning, Anti-Racism, Community Building, Caring, and Volunteerism, among other Noble Traits.
Part of me thinks that none of this is objectionable. If preschool teachers ran the world, we’d be thriving and we’d have more nap time. The other part of me is the child of immigrant parents with exceedingly ridiculous expectations. As I meander through these tours, a dark skepticism emerges.
I wonder: Why haven’t they said anything about my three-year-old memorizing the multiplication table? At what point in elementary school will they start reading Descartes? If they learn about “feelings” and “community building,” will that take away from their learning about “molecular bonding” and “microeconomics”?
Did you know that full-time working moms today spend more time with their kids than housewives did in the 1960s? That’s hard to believe. Maybe it makes sense, if you want your kid to be operating a genome CRISPR by the time she’s seven. But I don’t want to live that way and, my God, can I allow myself to wait twenty years for her to do genetics?
What I’m learning about the world—the original position and the grand experiment of parenting and teaching—is that you should be able to have both. Your child can learn about feelings and long division, about neighborliness and spelling. I’m trying to rewrite my own understanding of parenting because my immigrant parents never talked about emotions and neither did my kindergarten teachers. And now here I am, a comedian with a therapy bill.
There are seated members of Congress who grew up the same way I did. Some of them are doing God’s work in fighting inequity, and some of them are Marjorie Taylor Greene.
But what if Greene had gone to a school that emphasized volunteerism and community building? What if she learned about composting and its importance to sustainability? Might she have ended up being a really gracious politician who never tweeted?
What if preschool teaches kids how to play well together? Or that they can sometimes compete and fail, and that failing is OK because they’re still part of the larger school community? What if the main takeaway from a child’s fourth year of life is that your neighbor isn’t your enemy? Might she grow up viewing the American fabric in a loving and less-polarized fashion? Is it OK if she doesn’t know how to do calculus theorems?
So, I’m trying to shake up my baked-in tiger mom tendencies, un-ridiculous my expectations, and lean into the grand experiment. We’re making these toddlers’ brains from scratch, and we have a real chance to make them gentle and smart. I’ll let you know.