Yes, education was propaganda. You taught kids the values you wanted them to have, then hoped like hell those values would stick when they got bigger. But did you have to use such a big trowel and lay them on so thick? This stuff was as bad as what the schoolmasters who taught about the dictatorship of the proletariat or that the Führer was always right had used.
If she complained about it to James Henry’s teacher, what would happen? The books wouldn’t change. The Los Angeles Unified School District had its commandments, and one of them was These materials shalt thou use, and no others. And Ms. Calderon would decide she was a reactionary, maybe a dangerous one.
Ms. Calderon already had her suspicions. James Henry could read even when he started kindergarten, for one thing. All by itself, that made teachers and administrators suspect Louise of being an elitist parent. What else could she be, when she’d already done some of what they got paid to do?
She made a small, discontented noise. If they did a better job at what they got paid to do… She remembered what had happened in one Orange County school district—just south of L.A.—before the eruption. The staff there, in its infinite wisdom, had decided that the whole alphabet was too hard for kids in kindergarten to learn. So they’d left out four or five of the less common letters, figuring those would keep till the first grade.
When news of this educational innovation leaked out, everyone who heard about it screamed bloody murder. The district backtracked as fast as it could—it didn’t believe there was no such thing as bad publicity. But, as far as Louise knew, none of the educators who’d had the brainstorm got fired. Thanks to tenure rules, even sexual predators could be hard to can.
She made that noise over again as she paged through the speller. Her dog could spell most of these words, and she didn’t even have a dog.
She knew what the problem was. L.A. Unified wasn’t geared for kids like James Henry. He came from a middle-class background, and his first language was English. That made him stand out from the rest of the herd like a zebra with polka dots. L.A. Unified was about turning immigrants and immigrants’ children into citizens. It didn’t do that any too well, either, but at least it tried.
Private school? Catholic school? Louise was about as Catholic as a petunia, but even so… . Even so, what? she wondered. No matter how much she wanted to send James Henry somewhere better than the local public school, she couldn’t afford to. The public school was free. The others wanted—insisted on—cash on the barrelhead.
You get what you pay for. That was one of the oldest and saddest truths in the world. If you could cough up the money and escape from LAUSD, you got your kid a halfway decent education. If you couldn’t, Junior was stuck with this brain-dead pap instead. Good luck forty years down the line, too. He or she would be washing dishes or standing behind a cash register, waiting on the successful people whose folks had had the jack to buy them a head start.
She knew she’d left homeschooling out of the mix. Homeschooling was cheap, as those things went. It was also aggressively practical for a single mother, wasn’t it? “Yeah, right,” Louise muttered. You could stay home and teach your kid every single thing you wanted him to know. Sure you could—as long as somebody else went out to slay the antelopes and put antelopeburgers on the table.
James Henry wandered into the bedroom. “How come you’re looking at my books, Mommy?” he asked. “Don’t you already know that stuff?”
“Yeah. I do,” Louise answered. “The trouble is, so do you.”
“It’s okay. The work is easy.” James Henry might still be pretty new to this whole school thing, but he’d already figured out that skating through it meant he had more time to do stuff he actually liked. He wasn’t a dummy, not even slightly.
“It’s not okay. You should be doing more,” Louise said. “You know you can do work that’s harder than this.”
“I will.” James Henry wasn’t worried about anything, which was why being a first-grader was so nice. “When they give it to me, I will.”
Louise sighed. “I know. But will that be soon enough?” She imagined him learning the multiplication table just in time to graduate from high school. That wasn’t fair; she knew she exaggerated. Without a doubt, they’d teach it to him by the end of his junior year.
When she laughed—it was either laugh or cry—James Henry asked, “What’s funny, Mommy?”
“Your school is funny, that’s what,” Louise answered.
“It sure is,” James Henry said. “There’s this one kid—his name is Adrian—and he eats boogers.”
“Thank you so much for sharing,” Louise said dryly. Her older offspring had brought back tales out of school like that, too. Remembering her own days as a first-grader, Louise was sure she’d also been surrounded by little monsters. The kid who’d jumped up and down in a puddle of puke, for instance… When you started remembering things like that, you understood why you forgot so much of your childhood. It was one of the few mercies life doled out.
Disgusting Adrian probably wasn’t hurting anyone but himself. But the horror who’d jumped up and down… What was his name, anyhow? Now she’d go nuts trying to bring it back. But what must his mother’s face have looked like when she saw—and got a whiff of—his shoes? And his pants, too. He would have splashed the stuff all over them. Of course he would.
“Jimmy!” Louise exclaimed.
Her youngest son sent her a quizzical stare. “You never call me that. You get yipes stripes when people call me that.”
Yipes stripes were his name for the frown lines she got when he did things she didn’t like. And he was right—she didn’t like it when people called him that. But… “Jimmy isn’t your name,” she agreed. “James Henry is your name. Jimmy is the name of a boy I went to school with when I was in the first grade.”
“Oh.” James Harvey digested that. “He must be an old man by now, huh?”
“You say the sweetest things, dear,” Louise replied. She wondered what had happened to Jimmy. Was he the one who’d joined the Marines as soon as he got out of high school? She thought so, but she wasn’t sure. The only thing she was sure she remembered him for was that one morning at recess.
How come they hadn’t called him Old Pukey Shoes or something else just as elegant all the way through the rest of school? If he’d joined the Marines, maybe he hadn’t been anybody you’d want to mess with even when he was a lot smaller. She didn’t remember that one way or the other. Girls mostly didn’t have to worry about whether boys would knock their block off. Mostly.
“Do you guys ever have fights on the playground?” she asked.
“You get in trouble for that,” James Henry said.
Louise needed a moment to notice it wasn’t what the lawyers called a responsive answer. “Do you ever have any fights?” she asked again.
“I never got caught at one,” James Henry said after a visible pause for thought. Louise decided that would do. What you did mattered to you. Everybody did things he—or she—wasn’t necessarily proud of. What you got caught at mattered to the world. Any number of disgraced politicians and athletes and celebrities could testify to that.
James Henry seemed glad to go do something else then. He must have figured he’d get in trouble for admitting he might have had playground fights. If he’d bragged that he went around starting them, he would have. As things were… Colin had told Rob and then Marshall Don’t throw the first punch, but do your best to make sure you throw the last one. Louise had no use for her ex, but that still seemed a good recipe for not ending up in very many brawls.