Co-operative: Home Options In Childhood Education

Parents as Teachers

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Parents as Teachers

by Marian Buchanan

(page 3)

For parents to guide their children through the school-age years, is but an extension of the care and teaching already provided to them as infants and toddlers. Even if they send their child to daycare, only the most reluctant of parents would keep themselves entirely removed from the child’s discovery of ABC and 123, etc. After all, it’s part of who the child is, as a multidimensional being, and therefore falls within the domain of their responsibilities. If they’re reasonably glad of their parenting role, they also find great joy in witnessing and encouraging their child’s discoveries.

Children have a natural curiosity about their world and an eagerness to learn. It’s only when their learning is overly regimented from without, or meets with excessively frustrating obstacles, that they may lose their enthusiasm and interest. Given opportunities, support and flexible guidance, however, they flourish without the need for imposed motivation. In other words, given the proper configuration of the physical, emotional and spiritual dimensions, the mental dimension is open and free to function at its best.

No matter how wonderful particular schoolteachers can be, they aren’t the only kind of teacher in the system, and whether a child ends up with one of them or not, is neither of the child’s nor the parents’ choosing. It’s a bit of the luck of the draw whether a child is assigned a suitable teacher in any particular year, and to have nothing but “good” ones year after year, would seem something of a miracle.

The convention of sending children outside of the home for their academic education most often goes unquestioned; partly, perhaps, out of a widespread lack of confidence in parents’ competence as teachers.

After all, it’s argued, just because you know how to spell doesn’t mean you know how to teach spelling, and teachers are people who have received several years of training in order to learn the skill which is assumed to be lacking in parents. As pointed out above, however, parents already engage in teaching throughout childhood, as a natural expression of their parenting role.

There are two aspects to be considered: content and process, or knowledge and pedagogy.

Parent-teachers are in a different position from that of schoolteachers, in that the latter have to address their efforts to an entire classful of students at a time, whereas the former can adapt their approach to each of their children separately.

Without the logistical means to customize their output to each individual child, schoolteachers have no alternative but to adopt a set methodology and a set curriculum. The best of them will try to find ways to give little individual boosts, here and there, to those students falling behind, but in the final analysis, it’s the law of the average that rules, and stragglers will at times get left by the wayside.

As far as pedagogy goes, parents can tailor their approach to the unique requirements and style of each multidimensional child - and to do so is to celebrate that child’s being in a way that school can never replicate, because it engages a deeper love than that which a teacher might have for a child. Parents can experiment until a method “clicks.” They aren’t without resources: they can use the same creativity for presenting academic subjects as that which they’ve needed for any of the teaching tasks they’ve had to accomplish at earlier stages. They also have a variety of options concerning where and how to get outside advice or information: books, other people with experience, etc.

The same goes for knowledge: the information and skills specific to academic subjects aren’t beyond the reach of most parents, at least not for the elementary school age at which children are still formatively vulnerable. Enough literacy to look up what you don’t know, is all that’s needed to keep apace with where your child’s curiosity leads them, or with where you’d like to guide them. Whatever is beyond your understanding or skill ( be it high school physics or playing the violin) can be delegated to a trusted person if you know them to be aligned enough with your pedagogical beliefs that you won’t need to engage in damage control each time the child meets with them.

If the first side of the coin is that reasonably competent and caring parents are those who

have the responsibility of,
are in the best position to provide, and
are entitled to enjoy, their child’s “Education” and therefore education,

then the flip side of the coin is that anyone else is not in the best position and, even when given delegated responsibilities for the child by virtue of being the babysitter or teacher, doesn’t have the final, moral responsibility that a parent does; for, in the final analysis, the overall responsibility remains with the parents, and if they are to delegate, then they must still do so responsibly.

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