Exposed!

Twice a month HVSS holds information sessions for prospective students and their parents. I like to go because the questions and responses kind of reaffirm why I'm sending my kids tot his school in the first place and I think its good to get a parent perspective and I'll do anything to get out of my house.

At the last session I went to a dad brought up what I think of as the exposure question: How do you guarantee that they will be exposed to a wide variety of topics (his examples were the reformation or Latin)? The honest answer is that there is no guarantee. Just as there is no guarantee that when you expose your kids to something that you think is important they will develop an interest in it. There is a certain randomness, a certain luck to what we happen upon that piques our interest and when you assign a hierarchical (is that a real word?) importance to sets of facts or bodies of knowledge you are going to start excluding other sets of facts and bodies of knowledge because there just isn't room for everything. I think the exposure question is really the how do you know they are learning question in disguise because it presupposes that the inherent value of a topic should generate a correlating level of interest.

What parents should worry about is can they handle all the inappropriate stuff that their kids definitely will be exposed to? Trust me, if you send a little kid to a Sudbury school you better be ready to have some conversations that you are not ready for. Like drugs and alcohol. Like profanity. Be ready to explain childish teen sexual innuendos. I don't want to scare anyone away but when little kids are around teenagers they listen and repeat what they hear. It can be very uncomfortable but at least you are having the conversation when they still trust your opinion.