Ah.. a non-digital, thoughtful answer -
Nicely summarized and, and good reminder that we always Do project our own obv-much-earlier experience onto, trying to make sense of the unutterably-fucked chaos now spreading into every aspect of life, within the new Religio-Corporatocracy being accelerated for us all.
Surely parental-input (most of all: Attention! of that sort you reserve for people you love) has been a basic component of all 'education', for all of life. My experience was a tad different, so I'm trying to guesstimate another difference in approach:
I was in a private school for most of the grades + HS (econ. necessity, in the era when single-parent was aberration and there was no 'safety net' to speak of.) But there: each evening was study-in-room for x-hours. I think.. there was also "study hall" - either for the recalcitrant? or for those wanting to group-think re assignments. Never used it.
I suspect that this system was poor(er) for those needing lots of parental complement to the teacher's ministrations [?] but on the other side of coin: my 'need' was merely to have some invisible Authority decreeing that, this WAS indeed, 'study time' ... and I completed assignments uneventfully.
One might infer that on this side of coin also is: inculcation of finding the answers with minimal hand-holding. This could be called ~ 'learning how to think' in at least some form.
I find it most difficult of all - to fold-in the information of there being today, a majority of 'parents' so pooped, so filled with residual anger/angst at the vast new intrusion into home-time, of the Corporate 24/7 expectations .. and finding themselves (as you suggest) probably incapable of actually helping with assignments du jour.
To all teachers, everywhere in '04: Y.P.B.
You Poor Bastards
Worst of all: not ONE of us was ever prepared to witness, participate-in! the palpable, measurable Deconstruction of 'our society' overall. 'Progress' is inculcated as firmly as Jesus, the Puritans and Std. National Hypocrisy over all-Large-matters of the psyche.
Who, remotely! could have envisioned the machinations of a mere 3.5 Years -- in the undoing of means of production, housing, concern for local and global environment [fill in one's Fav] and the instant-burgeoning of the Armed deCivilized Warfare State / with AK-47s now everywhere ??
(Fla news post-hurricane: unnecessarily heavily armed troops in retirement communities! Eye-witness interview this AM on NPR.)
Who shall have time to address the school-parent-grades dilemma? while Not-becoming inured to the chaos which this tiny bunch of Neoconmen have wreaked -- so much of that directly from the perverse agenda of just a handful of nameable Troglodytes.
Now THAT's the rilly SCARY factoid re our rate-of-Decline. There will be no magic turnaround in our wholesale manufacture of dumbth, much as one would earnestly wish otherwise.
moi
