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> The key to succesful education is involved parents. It's really that simple. This is glib and easy to say, but I don't buy it. When parents try to intervene
by p4wnc6 11y ago
> The key to succesful education is involved parents. It's really that simple.
This is glib and easy to say, but I don't buy it.
When parents try to intervene in their child's education, schools are increasingly hostile. They are beginning to treat school children in a manner similar to how the TSA treats travelers.
Here's an example: my parents have a young daughter in middle school in the Midwest. She is active in a school choir, but also wants to do the science fair and many other activities. My parents are lucky because here is a kid who actually wants to do these things.
Yet, the choir forces kids to show up at 5:15 am (!) on a Saturday in order to travel 45 minute to a nearby school to do a choir competition at 7:30 am. Further, even though my sister's performance is over at 7:45 am, she has to stay with the school until well after 11:00 am and be bused home. The parents are not allowed to pick up the children early or give them a ride a home at all. This is for 6th, 7th, and 8th graders.
At the same time, my sister is expected to do work on her upcoming science fair project (which must adhere to an egregiously onerous template provided on the school's website) and also do all of her regular class homework (which is already a lot in its own right).
When my parents spoke up about the unreasonableness of the school making middle schoolers travel to a competition at 5:15 on a weekend morning, and also disallowing their parents from even picking them up early or anything, the school was borderline militant in their reply. They chewed out my parents, said they had no business questioning the choir director's choice of which competitions to attend or what the scheduling was, and basically said that the choice was either to put up or shut up. The school was not willing to compromise or even discuss any of their points about how unhealthy and overly burdensome the whole set of affairs was.
In smaller ways, this extends to classroom homework (which is at levels way higher than when I was a child, and yet the kids themselves say (and test scores seem to indicate) that they are retaining less and less of it). If a parent writes in to say the homework is too much, that it is stressing out their 6th grade kid who is staying up until 10:30 pm, crying and self-doubting the whole time, just to keep up with a single day's homework, you don't get any degree of reasonableness whatsoever.
I feel that schools and teachers have way too much authority over how children are treated and evaluated, what they are required to do, and so forth. They argue that they have to make it this way to comply with state and federal standards, and that's a big part of the problem. But regardless, it doesn't matter if you are a proactive and supportive parent if your attempts to provide a healthy and nurturing learning atmosphere are constantly and aggressively thwarted by the very teachers and school officials you want to try to work with.
- ThomPete 11y agoYou are talking about something very different though. The point is not about parents intervening it's about parent being interested in their kids education. That it matters what they learn, that you see their test scores, have adequate responsens and ways to deal with both good results and bad results.
- pc86 11y agoI'm not trying to be even more glib, but imagine just how much harder this would all be on your sister in the event your parents didn't care about her education and weren't involved as much as they are.
- p4wnc6 11y agoI hear what you're saying, but for the kids who don't have active parents willing to fight these battles, they pretty much just don't do any activities. In the short term, their lives are actually arguably better. They have more time to devote to homework, fewer obligations. Later on, their prospects for college and scholarships may not be as good, depending on what else they do. But at least in the short term, having disinterested parents sort of just means you get to have a comfortable childhood. It's really quite sad that there is such fierce downward pressure to begin the processes of employment competition and mate selection at younger and younger ages that we end up bottomlessly compromising away our children's ability to stop and enjoy life for a few years. If the downward pressure led to more well-adjusted, gainfully employed adults who benefited from the early crucibles, then I might be somewhat OK with it. But while parents are busy with the downward pressure, society is also busy making sure the kids can only get a job in some shitty start-up where they'll be lucky to have adequate health insurance, let alone ever having enough money to afford a standard of living that we collectively view as acceptable. Conditioned upon the inevitable shit-world that executives and political elites thrust upon us, if we really loved our kids we should probably teach them to value foosball tables and extroverted work spaces above all else. Then we'd at least prepare them for the real world.
- ashark 11y ago> the unreasonableness of the school making middle schoolers travel to a competition at 5:15 on a weekend morning This could just as well be "the unreasonableness of signing on for an activity then not wanting to do what's required to participate", and/or "the unreasonableness of signing up for more activities than one is (apparently) able to find time for". I thought she wants to participate in choir. I'd certainly get up early on the occasional weekend for something I wanted to do, and it wouldn't even occur to me to complain, ya know? As for letting her leave early, 1) they probably don't want to safely coordinate a bunch of individual pick-ups in an unfamiliar place _while trying to keep everyone else on schedule_, and 2) they may consider sticking around for the rest of the event to be important. It's really, really easy to imagine a world in which their refusal isn't primarily due to their being assholes. Maybe you're right about all this being an example of a hostile school, but your description of events makes it seem more like a case of whiney, entitled kids/parents. Again, maybe that's wrong, but that is definitely the impression I get from this tale, as written. I mean, this: "Yet, the choir forces kids to show up at 5:15 am (!) on a Saturday". I actually LOL'ed at the parenthetical exclamation point. Or: "and also do all of her regular class homework (which is already a lot in its own right)." I mean—yeah, of course. What's weird about that? Quit signing up for extra crap if you're having trouble meeting basic obligations. You cannot have/do everything.