My Miseducation On Education

March 24, 2025 – It was strange to be falling in love in my mid-50s. Feeling like a nervous teenager again, spending an inordinate amount of time on my phone texting, feeling day-dreamy and unfocused, the time I spent on my beauty routine tripled and don’t even get me started on the time I wasted in my closet choosing and rechoosing outfits for my dates with him.  It’s a stressful thing when you are a full-fledged grown-up and have so many worldly responsibilities. 

I will tell more about “our story” later but my worldly responsibilities referenced above included homeschooling my kids and supporting the microschool I founded for them 5 years ago.  I was a little late to the game and didn’t become a mom until I was in my early 40s. Before that I was a corporate tax attorney and a small business owner (I owned a small custom furniture store).  Never ever did I think I would be a homeschooling mom (that was for weird fundamentalist families) much less running a microschool for homeschooling families! That is the great thing about life isn’t it?  It is always full of surprises.

My former person (FP), (I hate the term “ex-husband” – it feels so dismissive because it reduces our 30 years together to two sad letters: e-x) and I were both products of the public school system and did very well in our K-12 years and beyond into college. We both knew many working teachers in our adult life, believed in the public school system and figured our kids would go to public school.  ***SCREECH***  That was until the executive director of the Sonoma Valley Unified School District (SVUSD) Educational Foundation asked me to be on the board of directors of the foundation when my first baby, Danielle, was still on my hip. At that time I had no idea what an Educational Foundation even was but after being home with babies for 2 years, I jumped at the chance to have a reason to put on cute clothes and use my brain again…lol.

It turns out that every school district has its own educational foundation – a non-profit organization that raises money and funds a variety of programs for the public schools. I LOVED my work with the foundation and dug into learning everything I could about our schools and the school system in general. 

The SVUSD, like the town, was very small and had only one high school.  Yet, for having only one high school and a fairly small population, we had a smorgasbord of pre-school and elementary school choices. We had a Montessori school, a Waldorf school, a Community School and a Spanish-immersion School. We had a ‘Reggio Emilia preschool, play-based preschools and academically rigorous preschools. I was like a kid in a candy store exploring all of the different pedagogies as well as the history and research behind each one. It was truly fascinating and hugely eye-opening. 

Here is what I learned about how our country educates our children: 

1. The way we educate our kids is based on a 1700’s Prussian model created to move large groups of kids through a system intended to prepare them for being factory workers. 
2. Teachers are overworked, underpaid and have little creative freedom (i.e. fun) because they are bogged down with too much mandatory curriculum squeezed into too little time
3. The number of kids that have anxiety, ADHD, or are on the spectrum has increased exponentially (in 2022, 7 million school-aged children, or 11.4% diagnosed with ADHD) and need individualized attention that a teacher responsible for 30 kids can’t give. 
4. Because the class sizes are big and diverse, teachers have to teach to the median. This results in the “smart” kids not being challenged, unstimulated and bored while students who need extra help get left behind, never to catch up. 
5. Change within a system as large as the California school system is like turning the Titanic, and it’s better to just start fresh from scratch than to waste a lot of time and money making very tiny changes. (See “$100 Million, Mark Zuckerberg, and a Controversial Education Experiment“)
6. We are all born curious learners and fostering that curiosity and keeping a child’s love of learning alive needs to be the foundation of every system of education. The aspects of our current system: forced curriculum, grouping children by grade levels, tests and report cards all serve to kill the very thing we need to keep alive. (See the book “Free to Learn: Why Unleashing the Instinct to Play Will Make Our Children Happier, More Self-Reliant, and Better Students for Life” by Peter Gray)

The personal always informs the practical, and the personal in this case was that FP had an affair when I was pregnant with our 2nd child (I will tell this story at another time as well). An affair in a very small town is a bit more tragic than most as the humiliation was waiting for me around every corner of the grocery store, the hair salon and the park in the town square where I took Danielle to play. It was inescapable and I simply couldn’t stay in Sonoma any longer. As we healed from this “lapse of integrity”, we moved a lot over the next 5 years. From Sonoma to Newport Beach to New York City back to Newport Beach. By the time my daughter landed in 1st grade at a Montessori school 30 minutes from our home,  it was her 5th school.  

For now it is enough to say that I always believe that there is always a bright side of a situation and in this case, while I healed from the biggest betrayal up to that point in my life (yes, there is more to come), the Universe was masterfully orchestrating my homegrown Masters in Education, and I was drinking it up like a lioness lapping at a river in the desert.

You heard the rumors from Inez
You can’t believe a word she
says most times
But this time it was true
— Taylor Swift

xo,

Renee