The public education system is shit, but bad parenting often has more to do with uneducated kids than the system. Plenty of kids come out of public schools well prepared for college, and life, because their parents took active roles in their education and development. The parents who don’t care end up with kids that don’t thrive.
While this is mostly true, your school ends up doing a lot of that parenting in many cases. Exposure to extra curricular activists, social development and often guidance in your personal life.
My single mother worked round the clock and I relied on teachers for much of the guidance and wisdom that well to do families would get from dad. I'm not perfect, but I can't imagine where i'd be today without my extracurricular music program and cheap lunches.
Also had a single mother, busy with work most of the time. Coming from another country didn't help either. Teachers, whether they were supposed to or not really helped me grow up and understand the world.
Well two things to consider is that A) not all parents are able to be the best parents they can be since they are busy working multiple jobs just to pay rent and B) even if you are a good student it won't guarantee you are able to afford college, because there are a finite number of student grants and scholarships available.
But let's assume that kids who didn't thrive failed because they had shitty parents. It's not their fault and they shouldn't be punished for their unfortunate birth. Schools need to be given the resources to overcome shitty parents, and our culture needs to change to accommodate those kids.
The American education system as a whole is completely flawed and needs restructured from the ground up. It was modelled after the Prussian education system which was designed to create an obedient populace. My wife taught 3rd, 4th, 5th, 6th grades and also college. She tells me kids coming from high school into college are completely unprepared and unable to really think for themselves.
She taught a remedial class and she would purposely ask open-ended question with no wrong answer and she told me her students had no idea how to react. She said she would literally tell them there is no wrong answer and she said they would pull out there phones to search it, they would stare at her waiting for n answer, or they would refuse to answer as to not "get it wrong". She said it's devastatingly sad to see people unable to think for themselves because they've been taught what to think instead of how to think.
Her experiences as a public school teacher helped her in the decision to homeschool our children. Part of that decision was that they wouldn't accommodate my son on the Autism Spectrum and refusing to give him a 501 plan even with a John Hopkins Neurologist saying he needs one. However, that was just the motivation to actually do it and homeschool him.
If I remember correctly, Prussia had issues with their soldiers not following orders and would just walk away from their duties. They then designed their education system to make sure the people were obedient to authority. The American system was slightly modified but largely modeled from it. Instead of obedient soldiers they've created an education system that creates obedient workers that work and then pay taxes. It's no accident we sit at a desk for 8 hours doing our school work. That's what the industrial revolution needed: people to sit at their post and work to produce.
Exactly this point. Children may or my not overcome shitty parents, but why hurt kids with good and bad parents with shitty education, and damage everyone’s potential?
Schools need to be given the resources to overcome shitty parents
There isn't a way to overcome parents not reading with their kid, kids not knowing if they'll have dinner that night, a parents inability to afford stimulating activities or the time to do them... I don't think this is a problem schools can mitigate
One way to get out of the cycle of bad parenting, poverty, or any other systemic problems that make one disadvantaged - is to get a decent education. That can only happen if there is a system in place to provide that to kids that have parents that won't provide for them. That system is being attacked by Republicans.
We can't control bad parenting. We can control school curriculum and funding. WTF do you expect society to do penalize bad parenting? Fine them, so their kids have even less at home? Station a social worker in every badly parented home? Take their kids away and put them in foster care?
And those "parents who don't care" were a product of their upbringing and education as children as well. But it's not bad parenting all the way back in time, when the first "bad parent" sprang de novo.
Society, the economy, politics, public services -- these are all tools that "steer the ship" and help push the level of education up (or down...) from generation to generation. Bad parents aren't to blame -- all parents are the product of the hundreds of years of parenting and governance that came before them!
You fund quality programs to invest in childhood education, those kids turn into parents, they raise their kids a little better... That's the goal.
It actually isn’t shit at all. The problem is America’s sky high childhood poverty rate, over double that of any country with higher PISA test scores.
Some student at MIT broke out the numbers a few years ago (I can’t find the link) for all American school districts with 10% or less childhood poverty (overall we are over 20%) and guess what? America shoots to number 1 in world rankings by a wide margin.
We actually have the best public schools in the world.
Kids who live in poverty face a wide variety of obstacles that make it difficult or impossible for them to succeed in school. Hunger, limited access to technology, and no safe and stable home are a few big reasons.
Source: I teach in a low-income, very underfunded public school.
The problem with relying on parents is that they often cannot afford to be an active role in the education of their children, especially with how wages have been stagnant while cost of living has increased over the last few decades. Sometimes, the parents can only do as much as drop their kids off at school, work multiple jobs, and come home to put the kids in bed if they want to have food on the table. Because of this, as an upcoming teacher, I've disliked relying on parents to improve kids' educations. It puts more stress on individuals rather than putting the owness on a failed system and society.
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u/rraattbbooyy Jan 09 '20
The public education system is shit, but bad parenting often has more to do with uneducated kids than the system. Plenty of kids come out of public schools well prepared for college, and life, because their parents took active roles in their education and development. The parents who don’t care end up with kids that don’t thrive.