We Don't Need No Education

Mom-pests, they are everywhere. Especially at the library.

To reinforce my every word of the inaugural We Don't Need No Education post, yesterday's Storytime gave me exemplary moms to skewer and roast.

So Tot and I are in the library, post Storytime—a particularly learning-oriented affair today, with greetings in 50 languages— and then 2 separate moms come along to tweak my vibe.

MOM #1:
She is someone I know only vaguely, and is perfectly nice and all, but has that special aura of the education-driven parent. This means that when reading to her tot, it becomes clear that reading is a very important activity, and must not be interrupted. Vocab words are stressed ("What terrific words here! Can you tell me what the word for this would be?") and enunciated carefully. Gratuitous counting takes place (i.e., the constant focus on the number of bunnies in the bush or tomatoes on the vine or whatever). And overall, a certain Julie-like tone is taken during reading. It is a hushed and delighted and above all, reverential tone. It is that tone that tells the tot she is in the presence of literature and that we must learn to bow before its altar before we can even tie our own shoes.

Mostly I just found it bugging that she seemed so hell-bent on making her kid read and didn't want to shoot the breeze with me.

Now, lest you think I don't dig books or have no aspiration for my own child as a future reader: I majored in French and English literature. I went to a good school. I went to grad school. I have read a book or two. I have even published some...ish... (okay, they were Sweet Valley High novels... and I was just a ghostwriter BUT THEY ARE PRETTY FREAKING GOOD). The point is, I like me some literature. I like me some high culture. I write short stories and they get published in magazines so classy that nobody reads them. People, the Crabmommy reads the New Yorker. I have even read Proust. In French. (Okay, maybe just a smidge of Swann's Way but I guarantee that's more than anyone in Crabtown has read of it. Except you, EB)

So please understand: Crabmommy is a friend of books. I love our library. Even if they do sometimes make the children sing "Old MacDonald lives in Yellowstone."

What I don't like is the mommy-focus on reading as this sacred act. And I always find it ironic that the people who seem most vested in the teaching of literature, art, and music to their tots don't seem to give a rat's bum about these things as grownups. I mean, are we really supposed to believe that Julie gives a toss about literature, art, or music? Is she donating some of those BE shekels to the NEA, or endowing sculpture scholarships? I think not. (And even if she is, I still don't buy it from her.) I think she is the sort of person who, if she saw a poet walking down her street, would call ChildWatch. Okay, I am getting carried away. I guess what I'm trying to say is that there seems to me a gap between what these moms push onto their kids and what the moms themselves are like as adults. Are they listening to opera on their ipods? Are they reading Vaclav Havel's memoir? Do they weep with joy when they finally clap eyes on that Brice Marden? Please.

They are fakes. They are the sort of people who chortle and squeal loudly during comedic lines of Shakespeare. As if they are just knocked out by how funny it is. I am not talking about a slight chuckle when Kate the wench is getting ticked off in "The Taming of the Shrew." I am talking about those false I-am-so -erudite-watch-
me-scream- with-laughter-at-Shakespeare types.

So, ahem. Sorry. Back to Mom#1. The reverential voice. As my mom would call it, a "sepulchral" voice. As in very precious and serious.

MOM#2:
Comes in with 2 kids, an older boy and a baby girl. Baby girl makes a lot of noise and I say, "What a lovely loud baby!" To which Mom replies, "Yes, she's already starting to experiment with sounds," or somesuch. Hmm. Already. But I try to ignore and hope for the best.

It's when the mom starts forcing the older kid, who just wants to run around the playroom, to focus on some Spanish and you all know what I think of that. Picture this: preschooler is running around playroom and diving into this wooden boat thing.

Mom: "Do you see the boat door, L? That's called a "porta" in Spanish. Can you count the portas?" Then the ghastly pronunciation begins: "OOH-NO, DOSE, TRAYS!" Then Mom turns to me: "He's dying to learn Spanish. We go to Mexico a lot." Then, Mama starts ASL-ing to the 6 month-old. "Do you want milk?" she asks, signing furiously that teat-of-cow sign we in American Momland have come to know only too well.

It took all my willpower to stop my Crabclaw from reaching out and pinching. And as always, I held my tongue, but my inner crab voice spoke loud and clear and it spoke to me in English: stop with the learning!

My final judgment:
I know I'm generalizing and being harsh, and maybe these 2 poor moms don't deserve it, who knows, but there's a chunk of moms out there who do: Moms who preach learning at all costs, you are insecure. You are striving to make your kids cultured and literary because you yourselves are not. You don't read great books or listen to Mozart. Forget Mozart. You don't listen to much of anything. Or read much of anything. You wouldn't know art if it fell out of the sky and onto your heads. And you like it that way even if, deep down, you suspect it's actually quite lame and pathetic not to engage the world beyond your own.

If you were a bit smarter and more interesting, you would know that it's okay not to worship Mozart.Or admire Monet. But you should probably, like, get excited about something, you know? Other than yourself and your kid's every cognitive milestone, that is.

You LFMs (Learning-Focused Moms), you're not listening, but here's some Crab-advice anyway: if you stop spending so much time on the project of developing little Madeline, you might actually have time to do something else.

Like read a book.

We Don't Need No Education

I'm not the only person tired of the emphasis on "educational" toys and TV etc. People have been writing about this lately in the media, and no doubt the debates will rage on, just as they did when Crabgrandmommy was a Crabmom—with one bunch of moms hell-bent on educating the tots and the other mommy-team lying on deck chairs smoking fags and telling the kids to "run along and play."

So I'm not the only one bugged by the very self-conscious focus on early "learning." But what Crabmommy doesn't wish to add her two cents to this topic? I have decided to make a mini column out of it. Every month or so I will be mocking some educational toy, or a striving parent begging his kid to say "agua" instead of "water," or a pesky pediatrician/librarian repeating the line I have come to find highly annoying: "Read to your children."

Are you reading to your children?
Make sure you read to them every day!
Read to them in Spanish!

Reading. Really? I never thought of that!

Okay, so here's my first target:

BABY EINSTEIN:
Making fun of BE is about as challenging as shooting fish in a barrel, but this is my blog so I'm gonna do it. In fact, I have enough material for a whole column entirely devoted to the mocking of Baby E. But I'll try to keep it short and sweet.

For those of you in Souf-Effrica or the UK or some highly civilized place where you are not subjected to BE from baby's birth (is there even such a place anymore?), this is a highly irksome show geared to make tots watch TV as early as poss. It is the brainchild of a very tanned and completely bugging chick called Julie Figgerton-Whilliker or somesuch double-barreled thing.

Now Julie F-W is quite stupid-seeming, or as we say in my homeland of SA—lank dof—and she is also just nutty about high culture and committed to force-feeding Michelangelo and Monet and Tchaikovsky down the minute tracheae of our tots. And because we are such suckers for educational TV (oxymoron, anyone?), and because yes I admit it, the tots seem to dig these stupid programs, we have made Julie Schickerton-Doohicky a multi-millionnaire.

WHY I HATE HER SO
* She is very careful in the BE fine print to make no claims to improving the intelligence of your child via BE, yet it doesn't take a genius to infer that Baby Einstein is precisely designed to tap into your striving parental impulse to beef up Quinn's brainpower. (I assume the fine print protects Julie from litigation in case Quinn doesn't make it into the Harvard of all preschools?)

* I can't take her voice-over on that show. When using a big vocabulary word or having her little wanker characters clap hands to Shostakovich, she speaks in this trembly voice—the kind of voice that has a smile in it—a voice tremulous with the delight or fragile wonder of it all. A voice like she is making a discovery. Like she has just found a new tomb. Makes me want to vomit in my socks.

* It's bad enough that the tots get taught lullabies in Mandarin and Czech. But Julie outdoes herself in the following particularly offensive episode:

Jules is teaching the kids the word "home." and she says it with her customary love and delight and wonder. Home. Home! But then there are images accompanying that word. And what are those homes? Nothing but palatial Victorian brownstones, Cape Cod farmhouses, New England Colonial manses...Platonic ideals of home, complete with dorky dads frolicking with gaggles of kids in hammocks, or airplane-ing infant on the abundant golf-course field of lawn that surrounds home.

So, "Home" is a mansion, eh? Not a log cabin? Or a trailer, Jules. Not even an apartment? Nothing less than $1 mill, eh? Not even a cool bungalow? Or a prefab? Even one from Dwell magazine? Julie needs to travel and see some homes. She can come to my humble abode. Or cross the street to the cowboy-infested compound you readers have all come to know and love.

Home. Home! And there's Marlee Matlin furiously sign-languaging the word. I have a sign for you, Julie. (And unlike American Sign Language, it's universally understood.)

*Last, the sign language itself: I hate to break it to you, but having Children of a Lesser God up there teaching your kid a spot of ASL isn't going to make your tot some kind of linguistic genius or friend of the the Deaf. Once upon a time I spent many months trying to learn ASL and since I speak a reasonable second-language French, it's reasonable to assume I might be able to sign a tad after a bunch of classes. But this Deaf thing, it's a little harder than Jules wants you to know. It is 1000 times harder than French, Mandarin, or Czech. Yet Jules makes it seem like the Deaf are just a bunch of mimes. And that your kid can be a mime too! What a crock!

WHY I LIKE JULIE
There is one thing I gotta say I admire her for: she's managed to convince us that watching TV will make our kids smarter.

Now that's genius!

For more rantings and even a mention of Julie, check out today's new post at my Cookie bloglet.