How many battles would I like to fight?

Not content with Dig's cancer diagnosis - for which the blog will morph into a whining pile of self-pity larded with too-much-anatomical-information* - I could choose other battles too!

1. Lord Soley Bill. Oh, you school choosers! How fortunate you are! You are cocooned already by the Corporate Curriculum. Your frogs are a nice, warm temperature. You know nothing of struggles out here, in the land of the free. Our frogs are still fighting.

We won't be free much longer, if LS et al. get their way. We'll all be at gas mark 9. No child left behind? Every child matters? There is a pragmatic behind that. These days, every citizen is an asset waiting to be stripped for the $$$$$ payback. The education budget translates into a lot of yachts.

2. Or I could choose the ongoing misery that is Squirrel's School. The battle is simply this: to get the school to stop treating Squirrel like a person of no independent thought, and start treating her like a young woman who has chosen to be there. The irony is: Squirrel is the least likely person to cause them problems.

Squirrel is laid back, easy to get along with, widely educated, articulate, fluent, an A-grade candidate who just asks Why. Yet the school cannot figure this, throwing themselves on techniques of reprimand rather than discussion. Not surprisingly, they have made for themselves a basic problem: that Squirrel doesn't fit the conveyor belt they have built. They have been creating consumers of facts, but Squirrel is a producer, creator, original person who makes her own destinies. She wants the school for 3 A Levels, not for their insistence on detailed scrutiny and control over her every action.

I do not know how you school choosers handle schools when they turn ordinary kids into problem kids. For a parent, it must be a long journey into emotional pain.

What I do see is that the Modus Operandi of the school is attempt to divide parent and child. It feels to me as if there must be the School Rule Book paragraph 1.3: To divide and rule, insinuate/use downright lies. Paragraph 1.4 probably suggests offering stuff like, 'your child is best supported by supervision to address their underperformance'.

I feel fortunate to be able to calibrate this nonsense by 17 years of self-directed learning in a virtually non-supervised home ed environment. This at least I can use to assess the quality of school 'supported supervision to target underperformance' (a seat in the library independent learning hub, on her own).

3. Myself. Yes, I can beat myself up any day of the week for various shames, guilts, losses, griefs, despairs and sorrows! Currently, I am in battle with life itself, facing (not for the first time) a profound overhaul of all my assumptions, expectations, wishes and desires.

Looking on the bleak side, this moment is something I am used to, this teetering-on-the-edge moment; knowing that I'll be leaving behind what is familiar and comforting; knowing that I am about to be pitched into the strange, fearful, bewildering, unfamiliar, scary. I feel ill-equipped to deal with it all, but know too that I'll be thrown into reliance on my instincts to chart a way through, and that will make a different person of me, once again.


* might be useful, if you face the same