I didn’t leave public education because I hated education. I left because I loved it, and somewhere along the way I realized that what I believed education could and should be looked very different from what I was participating in every day. I love beauty, deep thought, reflection, creativity, good books, meaningful conversation, and watching a child discover something that genuinely lights a fire in them. I believe education should help a child understand the world, know themselves, develop wisdom, wrestle with hard questions, and grow into a capable human being. But as both a public school teacher and a public school parent, I became increasingly dissatisfied with what we were calling “education.”
When my oldest daughter entered the system, I remember this strange feeling of being disconnected from a huge portion of her life. I sent my very young child into a building for most of her waking hours, and despite being an educator myself, I didn’t really know what she was doing all day. I knew the schedule and the logistics, but I didn’t know every conversation she was hearing, every idea being presented, every influence shaping her, or even how she was experiencing those long hours away from home. I remember her asking me, “When do we get to play?” She was so little, and yet somehow play had already become something she had to wait for. That question stuck with me because it represented something much bigger. When exactly did we decide that the best way to prepare very young children for life was to take so much of their childhood away from them?
At the same time, I was experiencing the system from the inside as a teacher, and I was burning out. At one point, I was teaching roughly 1,000 children every week. I loved those children, and I worked hard to give them something meaningful, but there is simply no way to deeply know, nurture, challenge, encourage, and educate that many individual human beings in the way they deserve. It became a constant cycle of moving children in, teaching the lesson, moving them out, resetting the room, and doing it again. Another class. Another standard. Another assessment. Another initiative. Another group. Another year. It began to feel like food for the masses when what children desperately needed was a seat at the family table.
And I was exhausted. That may be one of the hardest things for me to admit about those years. I spent my days giving my patience, creativity, attention, energy, and emotional capacity to other people’s children, and then I came home with very little left for my own. I wanted silence. I wanted solitude. I didn’t want another person needing something from me. I had poured myself out all day, and the people who mattered most to me were getting whatever happened to be left. I started asking myself how that could possibly be the right order of things. I had become so busy helping raise and educate everyone else’s children that I was too exhausted to fully enjoy raising and educating my own.
The longer I stayed, the harder it became to ignore the things that bothered me. I hated the obsession with testing. I hated watching genuine learning get pushed aside to accommodate standards, data, benchmarks, and whatever new educational fad had been handed down that year. I hated the constant cycle of new programs and initiatives that were going to “fix” education while teachers quietly knew another one would eventually replace it. I hated parts of the culture I watched developing around children. I watched bullying become rampant. I watched serious behavior destroy the learning environment for entire classrooms while everyone else was expected to tolerate it. I watched children get removed after terrorizing a classroom, receive screen time or candy in an office, and then skip right back into the room they had just turned upside down. Meanwhile, the children who were doing what was expected of them learned that their education could be interrupted again and again with very little consequence.
And I hated that Jesus was absent. We could talk about nearly every aspect of a child’s identity, development, emotions, relationships, and understanding of the world while carefully avoiding the One I believed mattered most. For my family, faith was not something I wanted relegated to Sunday mornings or squeezed into the leftover hours of our week. If I truly believed that Christ should be at the center of our lives, then eventually I had to confront the fact that He was nowhere near the center of the place where my child was spending the majority of hers.
I started questioning more. I started pushing against things I didn’t agree with. I wanted to teach differently because I believed education could be better. Eventually, I was told by members of my administration that they didn’t want to rock the boat. If I wanted to do things my way, I would have to leave the system. I don’t know if they realized how seriously I would take that advice, but that is exactly what I did. I left, I pulled my daughter out of the system, and I never looked back.
I want to be very clear about something because criticism of public education is often immediately interpreted as criticism of every person inside of it. It isn’t. There are wonderful teachers in public schools. There are incredible children and deeply involved, loving families who choose public education. I worked alongside people who genuinely loved their students and gave more of themselves than anyone should ever be expected to give. But the existence of good people within a system does not automatically make the system good. I believe the system itself has failed in profound ways, and pretending otherwise because acknowledging it makes people uncomfortable isn’t helping children.
We have created a system that can produce apathetic children who are constantly pushed from one thing to the next without enough time to discover who they actually are. Wake up, rush out the door, school all day, practice, homework, dinner, bath, bed, and do it again tomorrow. We call it preparing children for life while leaving them remarkably little time to actually live one. Somewhere in that constant movement, parents can slowly become supporting characters in their own children’s upbringing. We receive the tired version of our children at the end of the day, squeeze family life into evenings and weekends, and convince ourselves this is simply what growing up is supposed to look like. I remembered childhood differently, and I wanted something different for my own children.
I believe parents should be the primary people leading their children. That does not mean children should never have teachers, coaches, mentors, friends, or other trusted adults who influence them. Those relationships can be incredibly valuable. But parents should know their children deeply. We should know what they are learning, what they are questioning, what they are struggling with, what they love, what frightens them, who is influencing them, and what ideas are shaping their understanding of the world. We should know where their moral compass is being formed. More importantly, we should actually have enough time with our children to remain one of the strongest influences in their lives.
Leaving the classroom didn’t make me love education less. It made me realize how fiercely I loved real education. I wanted something slower, deeper, richer, and more human for my children. I wanted beautiful books and difficult questions. I wanted nature and muddy shoes. I wanted responsibility, meaningful work, creativity, reflection, conversation, faith, family, and time. I wanted my children to learn practical things alongside academic things. I wanted them to know where food comes from, how to care for something besides themselves, how to solve problems, how to communicate, how to work hard, how to think instead of simply being told what to think, and how to sit quietly enough to actually develop a thought of their own. Most of all, I wanted them to have time to become who God created them to be before the world had endless opportunities to tell them who they should become.
I also realized that I was probably never going to create the change I wanted from inside the system. I had tried to push against it, but the machine was simply too big for one little rebellious teacher to change from within. So maybe the answer wasn’t to keep trying to make myself fit inside something I fundamentally disagreed with. Maybe the greater impact could happen outside of it. Maybe we change education when parents begin asking uncomfortable questions, demanding real transparency, refusing to accept “because that’s how we do it” as an answer, and recognizing that they actually have choices. And sometimes, yes, maybe change happens when families walk away.
The uncomfortable reality is that enrollment is money. Funding follows numbers, and children are numbers on spreadsheets whether we like acknowledging that or not. When parents demand transparency, insist upon something better, choose another educational model, or pull their children entirely, they are voting with their feet and their dollars. Systems rarely change simply because someone politely points out that they are broken. They change when enough people stop participating in what isn’t working.
I love education. I always have. I just no longer believe education has to look like the system we have accepted as normal. I love beauty and deep thought. I love reflection. I love watching children become genuinely curious about something instead of learning it because it will be on a test. I love an unhurried childhood, and as I now raise three children of my own, I have become increasingly protective of how short and formative these years really are. We get such a tiny window with them. I don’t want to spend it rushing them through childhood so they can become adults sooner. I want to use it intentionally.
So I would urge any parent reading this—whether your children attend public school, private school, homeschool, or something entirely different—to ask yourself some uncomfortable questions. What do I actually believe an education is? Is it grades, standards, test scores, and college acceptance, or is it the formation of an entire human being? Do I truly know what my children are being taught? Do I see them enough to remain one of the greatest influences in their lives? Who is shaping their worldview? Where is their moral compass being formed? Does the way we spend our days actually reflect what our family claims to value?
Years ago, underneath all of my frustration and exhaustion, there was one thought I couldn’t get rid of: there has to be something better. Eventually, I stopped waiting for someone else to create it. I left the system, brought my child home, and started building the kind of education and childhood I had been looking for all along. And maybe one rebellious teacher couldn’t change the system from within—but I’m beginning to think she might be able to make one hell of a stir from the outside.
