Washington — The agonizing truth, as any parent knows, is that you can't ever feel you've done anywhere near enough to nourish your kids' minds.
One recent evening, I sat down with my 16-year-old to read Walt Whitman's "Song of Myself." It started out slowly. But after awhile, she began interjecting things intriguing thoughts and questions. By the time we'd finished, I could hardly contain my pride and delight. For about five seconds. Then a more customary parental emotion took over inadequacy.
I asked myself: Why didn't we do this every night? And why didn't we talk, really talk, every night at dinner about the day's news, about nagging social questions? Why were we always wasting time trying and failing to drag something out of her about how school was today? Why did we have so few discussions about what was going on in our minds?
Why did we quit reading poetry together years ago? Why didn't we ever read plays? And what of writing: We shouldn't merely have corrected all those "its" and "it's" confusions in essays night after night. We should've had full-blown drills, however many it took to root out the problem once and for all.
I wonder what it would be like to be your child's day-to-day teacher. To really know them as scholars, and feel the power of learning with them. To be familiar with their minds, and where the holes in their knowledge lie. To know the full dimensions of your responsibility none of this losing hold, losing track, losing confidence in their educations.
But probably even home-schooling parents feel inadequate. There's always more you should do. Think of the books about what your kid should know by age 6, 8, 10, 12. Precisely which stories, rhymes, sayings and songs are right for what grade. If you don't read "Puss in Boots" to your child at the requisite moment, will he end up on those other lists? Those recurrent ones that document the shocking gaps in knowledge among our youth: They can't identify the Magna Carta. They don't know the dates of the Civil War.
By that time, though, most of us have decided it's someone else's responsibility. We've relinquished control. "Goodnight Moon" was our job; the schools are supposed to be teaching them history.
And, however short we thought we were falling, we're readier still to see the school's shortcomings. We don't really know a lot about what's going on in the classroom. We merely do the dutiful-parent things: Back-to-school nights and parent-teacher conferences, glancing over a textbook now and then, asking about a reading assignment.
But a fuzzy acquaintance with what's going on doesn't weaken our critique. The nagging national feeling that we're not doing as well as we should to educate our kids helps power the recurring waves of education reform. Such as today's: accountability and standards.
We can't really think accountability and standards are going to prick our kids' curiosity, dare them to take risks, set them on flights of fancy or connect them with a larger world. That takes teachers. Extraordinary people who are as devoted as we are to developing our kids' minds but do it for a living.
If you're like me, most of your great teachers were women. Teaching used to be one of the few professions a woman could enter. So we had good teaching at very low salaries. Then women got other opportunities. But we stuck with the salaries.
We still have some great teachers probably more than we deserve at these pay scales. They have to be preternaturally noble. How could we get more of them? Think about what kind of a paycheck it would take to get you to teach. If we paid teachers on our own scale, much would follow. Standards and accountability, for example. We parents could even lighten our guilt burden a little, as to whether we're doing all we can.
But we wouldn't be off the hook. We'd have to go on thinking about whether we're setting the right example always into a book or two ourselves. Not watching much television. Grappling with what's going on around us. Discussing it with our loved ones. Being available.
And looking for that next magical moment when something like "Song of Myself" comes along to lift us along with our child into some other realm, a magical one where we can relish an intensity that is rare and precious. For just a few moments. Until that old familiar anguish of inadequacy overtakes it.
Geneva Overholser is a columnist for Washington Post Writers Group.
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