Barrett Oterson took her daughter to Walter Miller
Elementary School to help her study … on the grass while teachers picketed
nearby. She was joined by other parents and
their young ones. Here is what she told the
paper about what she was doing: “My daughter kept asking me, ‘Why aren’t we
going to school?’ So I said, ‘Why don’t
we just go and have class ourselves.”
Now, let’s be real about what Ms. Oterson was doing. She was using her kid to send a message to
the teachers. This wasn’t about
keeping her education going, because she could have done that at home. It
wasn’t about her daughter’s question, if it was even asked, because I’ve dealt
with that one myself and I didn’t need to take my daughter to the school to answer
it. All I had to do was talk to her in a
general way about how people get paid to work and sometimes disagree about what
they should be paid. What she accomplished was impressive … she got
her side a nice picture on the front page of the paper. That wasn’t even all she did. She risked the safety of her daughter to do
it (there were death threats and cars swerving at picket lines) and introduced
an interesting dimension into her daughter’s relationship with her teachers. Now, that might have been worth it in order
to get an advantage in a conflict with teachers … but let’s not pretend it had
anything to do with educating her kids.
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