The season premier of "Castle" featured a character mentioning his wife was pregnant with an additional child and the accompanying financial needs of the kid, citing food, clothing and college tuition. My parents raised exactly zero criminals or bums and their 7th & youngest child has reached the age of 25, so it's not like you can say it's a matter of time before their faulty parenting is exposed. And they too paid through the nose for their children's education. But unlike TV characters, those last two words were true in more than one sense of the word - they paid for our educations WHEN WE WERE CHILDREN! Everyone knows that getting an early jump on teaching kids is for the best, but it seems like TV parents settle for educational toys and then take a 12 year nap and work themselves into a massive emotional state once their children technically stop being that.

I grew up with the understanding that parents get their children the best elementary & secondary education they can afford, and higher education is the responsibility of the adult students to procure. We were told upon graduating high school that we could have free room and board for each month during which we were enrolled in school full-time, otherwise it was pay rent or move out. My father's explicitly expressed policy toward co-signing a student loan was "No. If I co-sign for your car, and you die, I at least still have a car. With a student loan, I'm on the hook with nothing to show for it." That was in regard to one of my dumber younger (forgive the redundancy) siblings. I knew better than to ask (or go into debt in order to pay people to tell me to read a book more slowly than I normally do), or more precisely, it would no more have occurred to me to ask my parents to co-sign a student loan than to ask them to pay for my entertainment or clothing once I became an adult.

I realize that there is free school for children, but there is also free cheese and stuff like that provided by the government that most people would die rather than partake of. And the vast majority of our society purports to hold education in high esteem, as some sort of vital resource. In fact, just about all their behavior is completely counter-indicated, if they do indeed think education is important. People pitch fits if the company selling advanced versions of their luxury toys decides to raise the price, but they roll over and fold when the providers of an essential necessity like education try to hold it hostage with teachers' strikes. They don't trust the government to deliver drinking water, and make Poland Spring and Dasani wealthy for selling something that falls out of the sky, but they do trust it to play a critical role in their children's formative development. No one uses the postal service to ship packages, with UPS & Fed Ex having entered the vernacular as synonymous with delivery service. In that same general parlance, counting on public transportation is some sort of symbol of rock bottom. Public television has to beg a nation on the verge of TV addiction and the first steps to making Wal-E a documentary, to give them money. The government recently started participating in the health care industry, and people are pissed that they are performing just about as well as they do in education.

How is it a sign of caring parenting to highlight how you are neglecting a critical issue of child care, by volunteering the information that you intend to coddle them after they are supposed to be able to take of themselves? Another near-universal concept to which popular entertainment pays lip service is the horror of the foster-care system, but even if you discount the inferiority of the education public schools provide, you are still turning your children over to a bureaucracy of the same government that runs the child services. Or the prisons. For that matter, what does the government do well? The space program, which has given us nothing but a bunch of inferior quality fastening devices and citrus-flavored beverages? Or the military, which hasn't defended the country from a single attack since they changed their name to the Department of Defense, and has completely failed in each attempt to conquer a third world country since we got a weapon that made relatively prosperous nations too scared to challenge us. And even when we did go toe-to-toe with first world powers, we only won decisive victories when we possessed massive numerical and financial advantages, or they spoke Spanish. Not that most people know these things, having been "educated" in public schools. The very state educational establishment that oversees juvenile education makes the same students to whom it gave high school diplomas, take basic skills tests upon entrance into a state college! They don't trust their own product! And with good reason. When my professor remonstrated with me for exhibiting boredom during my mandatory first semester writing course, I pointed out that we were learning about "action words" and "naming words" which I learned, along with their proper terms, in second grade. The professor's retort was that not everyone in the class went to Harvard second grade. "Harvard second grade" was taught by a middle-aged church lady housewife in a chapel basement. However unimpressive that might seem, it is apparently an order of magnitude above the entire mandatory education establishment of the state of New Jersey. Most of the people who needed that remedial education had parents paying for their college, after cheapskating through out the first 12 years of their schooling. I was paying for it myself, after having my parents pay for the first 12 years (and selecting schools with more of an eye toward religious fanaticism than educational merit). Isn't it amazing the difference when parents actually care enough about their kids to think through what would be best for them, instead of knee-jerk acceptance of prevailing social patterns?