Co-operative: Home Options In Childhood Education

Parents as Teachers

An essay by Marian Buchanan, published online by C:HOICE, a co-op style group for homeschooling families. Copyright © 2000 by Marian Buchanan. All rights reserved.

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Parents as Teachers

by Marian Buchanan

(page 2)

This is a whole human being we have under our care, a whole universe unto itself, not just a conglomerate of separate parts that can be shaped independently of each other. What shapes one dimension, automatically impacts the others.

• Feeling sick can interfere with mental concentration, make one cranky, and challenge one’s spiritual resources;
• Ideas can trigger emotions, dictate attitudes towards the body, and determine one’s spiritual path;
• Anger can flood the body with damaging chemicals, cloud one’s mental judgement, and blind one to spiritual connections;
• Attunement to the source of life can promote healing, emotional comfort, and clarity of thought.

All these dimensions interact whether we intend them to or not.

Reasonably competent and caring parents are in a unique position to guide their child’s unfolding holistically, that is to say, with awareness of and deliberate attention to all of the dimensions of being within the context of their interactions.

If the key to a child’s highest potential is in the dynamic intertwining of all dimensions including the mental, who better to “educate” a child (in the narrow sense of teaching academics), than those whose responsibility and joy it is to “Educate” their offspring (in the etymological and epistemological sense of leading out their potential)?

With rare exceptions, parents are by nature those with the strongest love for their child, those with the child’s best interests most at heart. They know their child more thoroughly than anyone else, and can adapt to the child’s pace and give extra attention where and when the child needs it the most.

• No matter how loving and caring individual schoolteachers may be, they cannot logistically provide the quantity and quality of individual attention that would nurture each child’s natural unfolding.

Parents are the constant in the child’s environment. They have the necessary background information to interpret each stage of the child’s development in an accurate context. They are there throughout childhood and beyond, to follow through on what they teach and keep the teaching consistent.

• No matter how dedicated particular schoolteachers may be, they aren’t provided with the means to stay in pace with an individual child’s progress, nor to follow through, year after year. Teaching methods may be inconsistent from one teacher to the next, as may be the values imparted, both explicitly and unconsciously.

Values that parents wish to pass on, can be done so most effectively the less interference they receive from hidden messages inconsistent with their own; in other words, the less time the child spends in environments that don’t support the parents’ values.

• No matter how kind and ethical specific schoolteachers may be, their own value system may be quite different from that which the parents wish to impart. There are those who would say that it’s not within the school’s mandate to impart values, but there is no way not to impart them, deliberately or not. Everything we do or fail to do expresses values, whether aligned with our conscious value system or diverted by our emotions; whether our actions are freely chosen or we are carrying out someone else’s directives, “following the rules,” “just doing our job.”

The school’s curriculum is itself riddled with values, many invisible to those who take them for granted.

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© 2000 by Marian Buchanan. May not be used without permission.