An Educational Standoff

I am a parent. More particularly, I am the parent of a teen-ager. I feel some responsibility for my child’s education. I try to participate. Help out. After all, education is supposed to take place both at school and in the home. At least that’s what they say.

My daughter does not pay any attention to what “they” say. She does not know who “they” are. She does not care.

The conflict between us can be summed up succinctly: To me, school is where education begins. To her, school is where education ends. She does not think before 8:15 in the morning or after 3:00 in the afternoon Mondays through Fridays. Those are her hours. Learning takes place during those hours or it doesn’t take place. That’s all there is to it.

I no longer delude myself that my daughter has a love of learning. She has not. She makes no bones about it. She does what she has to do in school. She even does it well. But she doesn’t do anything extra.

I have reluctantly accepted this. I have given up my involvement in math, science, French, history and everything else. Except English. Particularly vocabulary. I remain stubbornly convinced that if she knows how to talk and she knows how to write, she’ll be OK no matter what she doesn’t know. Thus has my sphere of influence over her education contracted. I am down to the 59,000 words in the Webster’s New World Dictionary. Within that narrow compass our ongoing battles are fought.

The symbol of our conflict is the “word of the day” game that I want to play and she doesn’t. It’s a simple game: I give her a word every day and expect her to look it up in the dictionary and learn it. She considers this a monstrous imposition on her time. Our conversations go something like this:

“Sweetheart” (not her real name), I say, “It’s only one word a day.”

“I have lots of other things to do, you know. I don’t have time for this, too.” But I persist. And she resists. Indeed, she even has a principled position: The more she learns, the more she forgets. She can’t be expected to remember everything , can she? If education is what’s left over after she’s forgotten what she’s learned, maybe she’s right. So far she has convinced herself that I’m wasting her time. She hasn’t yet convinced me that I’m wasting mine.

For these crimes I am regularly called to account. I am accused of child abuse--intellectual molestation, to be exact. A teen-age girl shouldn’t have to endure this kind of mental assault. She shouldn’t have to know anything that everyone else doesn’t know.

I’m a habitual offender. As far as she’s concerned, I’ve had too many chances already. I’ve blown them all. There’s no hope. Since I present only a minimal danger to myself and others, she’d like to sentence me to spend the rest of my life in a library. Poetic justice. But the libraries are closed at night. Besides, I have a family. My daughter is not completely without compassion. She is stern. In the end she relents. I am let off with a warning.

She was away for the summer. She is back now, about to return to school, and I am back in trouble. I am incorrigible. I cannot help myself. I know that it’s only a matter of time until I do it again--until I expect her to know something that she didn’t learn in school.

So far my crimes have been petty stuff: Verbal exhibitionism. But who knows what’s next? Impersonating an English teacher? Educating without a license? I’d better stop before it’s too late.

Franklin R. Garfield, an attorney, lives with his daughter, Phoebe (her real name), in Los Angeles.