How 45 Balloons Helped Convince us to Home Educate

This incident is one of two public school experiences that are largely why we decided to homeschool at the end of our first child's year of kindergarten:


Oldest (HG) was in Kindergarten. At her initial placement test the teacher told me that HG knew everything she was planning on teaching the class. I asked what she would be doing, then. Teacher assured me that she would have lots of fun, and would have lots of 'enrichment activities' to do.

I learned that 'enrichment activities' was apparently the title of the most boring workbook in the world. Every page HG brought home had 'enrichment activity' printed in small letters in the top corner, where title page info might be. None of the pages covered new concepts. They were all coloring pages about the letters of the alphabet and counting to ten- which HG had long known and had no need to practice. HG got to sit by herself and color those boring pages while the rest of the kids played games and mixed edible clay to learn the alphabet and their numbers (which HG already knew). HG could count to a thousand when she entered kindergarten, and she loved playing with numbers. She never got to use those skills.

One day she came home in tears; her teacher had chastised her in class, written a nasty note on her paper, and requested a meeting with me. Her "enrichment activity" paper that morning instructed her as follows: (line 1) 'Draw and color one balloon' (the balloon was beautiful and detailed- you could see the knot, and the string was curly, there was even a square showing reflected light on the balloon.)

(line 2) 'Draw and color two balloons' (the balloons were nice)
(line 3) 'draw and color three balloons' (the balloons were showing signs of wear)
and so on, through all the numbers, down to: 'Draw and color nine balloons." The balloons were, IMO, terrific, an appropriate response to such a bone-headed assignment. She drew nine balloons, each with a single stroke- they looked like nines, the tail of the nine being the string on the balloon. To color them she laid her crayon on its side and gave it one broad stroke across the top half of the nine nines.

She thus completed a busy work assignment that was clearly supposed to keep her out of the teacher's hair for twenty minutes or more in about two minutes. Across her page in big red letters the teacher had written 'Is this your BEST work?! I want to see your mother." Hence the tears, and here I also learned something of what government institutionalized schooling does to children's heads even in Kindergarten. I reassured my sobbing child, reminding her that we had recently had a talk about this very thing, and I did not care about whether or not she colored 'inside the lines' or drew perfect pictures.

"I know, Mommy," sobbed my five year old, "But I am afraid you will go and the teacher will make you care!"

"As if," growled my inner rebel, now a mama Bear.

At that meeting I displeased the teacher by saying that I didn't think all activities deserved the same level of care, and I was pleased with how my HG had handled that paper.
I'm afraid that things may not have changed as much as one might hope, because whenever I have shared this story, any teachers in my audience generally think these assignments were right on target and the teacher perfectly reasonable and I was not. They say things like “But children need to learn to follow directions” (no matter how stupid and pointless, foolish, and unimportant and unnecessary they are, apparently). I was not bringing up my children to be mindless automatons who simply do as they are told without question in every single situation.

What I also find interesting about that response is how unthinking it is. Apart from the philosophical flaws on the face of it, this typical reply is a rote answer that has little to do with the subject. Because notice, my daughter followed directions. She drew and colored the number of balloons she was told to draw and color. She did not draw and color fish or bison. She did not fold her paper up into an airplane and sail it around the room. She did not wad it up and toss it in the trash- she just did it creatively, and this, apparently was a problem serious enough to merit verbal and written reprimands and a parent-teacher conference.

What happens inside teacher's education programs that results in the majority of people who have been through those sausage mills think this way?

This is a tale of a child innovatively following directions she never should have been given.
Why do I find so many products of State Institutionalized Schooling and training reinterpreting this story  as a failure on the part of the five year old (and then a failure on the part of her mother for not jumping up and down in favor of tedious drudgery and busy work as appropriate pedagogy)?
How does coloring in the lines and drawing with the same meticulous care and attention to detail each single one out of 45 balloons become an example of something that is right with government schooling?