Should schools or parents be in control of a child's education?

Schools

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by Lana Evans

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It's easy in our busy world to underestimate the task of teaching. It's even easier to overlook the nature of the school system. The school is a tiny community that reflects the general structure and social values of the United States as a whole. Schools are a valuable necessity that can easily be taken for granted. Overall, they have all of the resources, equipment, technology, and departmental staff members needed to reliably educate children. School counselors and other professionals are always available to help kids who have valid special needs. Educators are formally qualified to teach kids, while parents generally don't have teaching degrees. The school system is the main institution that prepares children to make the transition the adult world once they are grown. If anything, schools should recognize the scope of influence they have on our kids and take more responsibility in some areas.

Parents, on the other hand, seldom take a regular and vigorous interest in their child's education. Keep in mind that I'm speaking of millions of parents, not just a few thousand who may be the exception. The U.S. is far bigger than those exceptional households. The majority of parents are genuinely too busy with work and the relentless pressures of many other adult issues to even take their kids out dinner or local functions, much less routinely put in the time to educate them. We care about their grades and we give them our best encouragement, but most of us seldom stop our whole lives to zoom in on the details of our children's tedious school assignments. We are fortunate to have a mandatory school system in place that is managed by people who devote their whole lives to the painstaking, sometimes drudging, cause of transferring information from textbooks into student's minds. If a parent has only one child and doesn't work a full-time job, than it's likely that he or she will have every opportunity to take a regular and vigorous interest in the child's education. But a parent's availability is not a guarantee that the parent will get regularly involved. And that shouldn't be considered a parental flaw because not everyone is cut out to teach on an academic level. Many excellent parents make terrible teachers. Some parents make good teachers. The point is that there are all kinds of parents out there and t would be inaccurate to say that all of them actually qualify to solely control their child's education.

As it is, no expectant parent goes to a prenatal class to to earn an actual degree in parenting. Parenting itself is challenging enough. If the government were ever to actually grant the wishes of some parents and charge all parents with the sole responsibility of educating their kids, the government couldn't do so without requiring parents to become formally qualified to teach. If it became a large-scale, national way providing kids with their education then parents would be required by law to take themselves to school and learn a thing or two about how kids learn and various teaching approaches. Then we'd risk constant harassment by the government agency that would oversee this new method if we couldn't keep our child's academic performance up to par. Anything overseen by the government would have to live up to the government's minimum standards. Some parents complain that the current government standards for education are too low. Those parents are encouraged to take upon themselves the task of making their own kids extra smart if they so wish. That's their prerogative. But it would not be fair to charge all parents with the time consuming chore of being in total control of their kids schooling. Generally, parents are unprepared to be teachers. As it is, no parent is prepared to be a parent and it takes years of experience just to do that. It's a task that many people underestimate; so is teaching.

The assumption that a parent will have some kind of intuitive teaching skills is often misleading. The fact is most don't. If any do, they usually won't apply those skills to any real extent five nights a week, week after week. Those who can afford it simply hire tutors. We can not rely on people who haven't dedicated their lives to the practice of teaching to prevent kids from failing. That would not be wise. It's unrealistic to pressure parents and expect full cooperation every time. When children are failing, it's because parents aren't successful with guiding their kids in education in the first place. To pressure them won't change that.

Parents are busy people. Sometimes we have more kids then we feel we can handle. That doesn't make us bad. But with the way society works in our modern times, we grew up expecting to have a career or at least a job of some kind working for someone else. Schools are what trained us for that. Through learning the academic ethic at school we picked up on the idea of what an employer will expect of us in a formal situation. We have to attend. We have to preform. There will be little tolerance for personal weaknesses in the real world. Employers won't coddle employees like parents would. And neither will schools. They well give our kids an honest impression of what to expect when they grow up and join the real world along with all their peers.

Regrettably, the farm days are over. Daily, people are separated from each other to go off to school and work. We don't just hang out all day together milking cows and canning fruit. There was a day when one would be deemed well educated to have non-industrial skills. We live in industrial times now, and part of training children to live in the real world consists of more then academic education. Children need to be socialized to answer to a formal authority as well as to cooperate with the people in their own households. We aren't just born with the capacity to show up to a job everyday and take orders from the boss and be punctual about it. That is a learned skill that is unique to industrialized peoples and requires a lot of training to master.

There are a lot of different kinds of "education". A third world citizen would be well educated not to learn under our educational system but to learn the skills that are useful and in high demand in his or her village. What are they going to do with algebra and business writing in some remote village? They need to learn the skills that are specific to their community. The same goes for our American children. Our children learn not only academic skills at school but they also learn the social skills requires to fit into our society successfully.

Few parents are willing to treat their children in a formal fashion and "militarize" the household rules in order to experiment with their teaching ability. They won't give the child a strict dose of real-world expectations. And they shouldn't, either. A kid needs a parent to be a parent, not a formal authority figure. Sure, we have authority over our kids, but few of us are so extreme as to make the home an uncomfortably strict and cold place. If a parent treats a child with too much formality, then the kid is robbed of an essential childhood experience and will grow up bitter, detached, and not well-rounded psychologically and socially.

The current national system that characterizes our children's world utilizes a number of components in order to function to the best benefit of our kids. As long as we adults can manage to keep those components functioning and properly balanced, our kids will get the chance they deserve. Just as we can rely on parents to put their many years of specialized parental experience to work to contribute to a well-rounded generation of Americans (and I hope they take that job seriously) we can rely on the expertise of educators to complete the overall scheme of socializing children to function as healthy citizens and lead fulfilling, happy lives as a result.

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