Co-operative: Home Options In Childhood Education

Parents as Teachers

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Parents as Teachers

by Marian Buchanan

(page 4)

This is the crux of the matter:

Because no dimension of being can be isolated from the others, it’s not possible to delegate the care of a particular dimension without also handing over the power to impact all the others.

And because childhood is a particularly formative stage of life, it matters who the child spends time with, and what the nature of the interaction is.

You don’t, for instance, leave a child with a babysitter about whom you know little concerning their emotional responsibility, what disciplinary actions they take, and to what language, concepts and experiences they are likely to expose your child.

Like babysitters, schoolteachers have multidimensional beings in their care, not just a mental compartment that can be filled with academic learning independently of the child’s physical, emotional and spiritual learning.

Like babysitters, schoolteachers should therefore be people whose behaviours and values are known and approved by those in whose charge children are placed by nature and by law - namely, the parents.

In the current public school system, parents aren’t given the choice of who will teach their children. Children are assigned to a school geographically, to a curriculum by age, and to a teacher according to which one is filling that position.

Leaving your child in a school for six hours at a time, day after day, requires that you entrust your child’s total development - not just academic achievement -

to a teacher who is most likely a stranger,
to a peer-intensive environment, and
to a system which, by its very structure, expresses certain embedded messages and values.

If you are aware of what those messages and values are, and you agree with them;
if you believe that a peer-intensive environment is good for your child; and
if you trust that any stranger employed as a teacher will, by that very fact, be in alignment with your own notions of how a child’s unfolding is best nurtured,

then consenting to send your child to public school is consistent with the fulfillment of your parental responsibilities.

If, however, you disagree with the school system’s ways of dealing with embedded issues of anonymity, herding, competitiveness, segregation by age, imposed subjects, imposed schedules, etc;
if you are concerned about the kind of social conditioning your child is likely to receive in a peer-intensive environment;
if you want to retain the right to choose the person in whose charge you leave your child,

then it behooves you to find an alternative to public schooling, however inconvenient or unusual that solution might be.

Some will find an acceptable alternative in a private school, as they often have smaller classes and distinct philosophies and pedagogies with which parental values may align.

Others may decide that the best environment in which to

retain the family’s values,
learn at one’s own pace and in one’s own learning style,
honour all the dimensions of one’s being as they intertwine,

is the same environment in which infancy’s unfolding was lovingly guided, and in which parents are dispensers of love, care, and teaching:

the nurturing environment of home.

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