Rights Given Up or Kept

Since the parent-teacher's meeting at the end of last week I've been thinking about school purposes and school culture.  In many of the perplexities about school, I see no ideal solutions.  Who is responsible for carrying out school purposes and establishing school culture?  Even the cautious "this is at least part of the picture" propositions are a little unsatisfactory, although I realize that such ideas are often the best that any of us can offer.

Rather than pursuing these questions to a final resolution, I've been thinking about how differently these questions must be handled in a group school setting than in a homeschool setting.  This process has been instructive, and I'm passing along a list of what has come to mind about rights parents give up when they send their children to a particular classroom school.  I'm not wishing to discredit the group schooling effort, but to promote understanding about what is possible and what is impossible in that setting.

First, a disclaimer:  I haven't thought through how all the implications of sending children to public school differ from the private Christian school setting I'm most familiar with.

Rights Parents Give Up in a Group School Setting

--The right to choose curriculum

--The right to determine the best learning environment for one's child

--The right to determine what company a child keeps

--The right to choose the child's teacher

--The right to decide how much the child's education will cost

--The right to decide what consequences the child will suffer for wrongdoing

--The right to determine what encouragement the child will receive

--The right to have special needs accommodated (unless you're content to have the child labeled so that he or she fits into a category mandated by law for accommodation)

--The right to determine the child's daily schedule (except for a few hours before and after school)

--The right to create a particular atmosphere

Having created this list, I'm impressed with how little choice is left for parents, and how much "power" is ceded to school personnel.  I'm not sure that this is as it should be, but I don't know how to change it, except incrementally perhaps.

For an exercise in visualization, consider each point in the list, and you will see that, with some qualification perhaps, a homeschool environment guarantees that parents keep each of these rights.  Parents keeping these rights seems ideal to me, but it I don't see it happening in a classroom environment.