Tuesday, October 2, 2012

Getting what you want, part 3

I'll keep this brief.

Wife's response to my explanation here about the moral benefits of the education that the boys will be getting at Hogwarts and Durmstrang was to write me a long e-mail in reply and then also buttonhole me over dinner over the weekend to talk at great length about it all.  But her message, over and over, came down to this:

You're basically telling me that schools are far better at raising kids than parents are. In that case, by far the majority of kids are going to be majorly fucked up, because a very small percent go to boarding school.

And my answer, phrased in a hundred different ways, was this:

No, I said nothing about who is the better parent for our boys.  The teachers at these schools are simply specialists in educating this particular age-group, in the same way that a pediatrician is a specialist in childhood diseases.  Sending them to these schools when they are adolescents is no different from sending them to the pediatrician when they are sick.  And I never said that other kids will be "fucked up" by living at home.  Maybe they will learn these same things in some other way.  I can't know that.

But of course it took longer than that, because we each repeated ourselves a lot.  I don't think she was convinced.

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