- Have been raised by great parents but attended terrible schools.
- Have been raised by terrible parents but attended great schools.
Or, since I have a two-year old, I might ask which I would prefer for my son. If something were to happen to Ashley and myself, which of the two situations would I prefer?
My actions may already speak for me. We have long had an order-of-succession should something happen to us. But we have not had an order of succession should Carter's teacher find a new job, or his daycare close altogether. I'm pretty sure that, so far as Carter's life chances are concerned, parents are far less replaceable than teachers.
Excepting the most egregious cases, adults don't spend months in therapy trying to get over the fact that their seventh grade teacher didn't love them. Generally speaking, parents have much more influence over their child's success and happiness than any other person.
Does this mean that teachers are powerless? Certainly not. But wise teachers recognize that the surest path to student improvement is through improving the student's home life. A comprehensive plan to help parents do their part must be included if we are going to see serious improvement in children's chances at life.
If the home life is so disfunctional that this is not possible--if the parents suffer from addiction, or are abusive, or neglectful, or simply incompetent--school must become a home away from home. One promising answer is to expand the quantity and quality of hours children spend in a positive environment. Many charter schools do this by keeping kids before and after school, as well as on some weekends and parts of the summer. Canada does this by subsidizing high-quality child-care and pre-kindergarten.
3 comments:
I had great parents and terrible teachers (at least in my early years of school - later on, my parents were still great, but the schools were better), and while I suppose that is the better of your two choices, I don't think anyone should have to settle for terrible schools. At the very least, kids deserve mediocre schooling. Bad schools can do nearly as much to screw up a kid as bad parents.
"My 7th grade teacher didn't love me" isn't bad schooling, it's mediocre schooling. Kids get over that. Bad schooling is when the teacher has her class vote a kindergartener out of the class; then the kid isn't unloved by just the teacher, but by every one of his peers. Ouch.
My early grade school years really messed me up in some ways. (You know, that's probably the real reason I have no desire to study K-12 - the flashbacks!) And there are kids with worse experiences than mine - kids who are molested by teachers, for example. Now maybe being molested by a teacher isn't "as bad" as being molested by a parent, but at a certain level of badness it doesn't matter whether something else is worse; it's already too much.
I guess my point is that truly *terrible* anything in the life of a kid isn't OK. A kid spends a lot of time in school, and at that age schooling influences out-of-school time as well (who the kid's friends are, for instance). But if you just mean mediocre schools and teachers, that's a different matter.
Point taken. I think the situations you describe (molestation, for example) go beyond my intended definition of "terrible." And I certaintly didn't intend to imply that either situation is tolerable.
I meant this as an old-fashioned philosophical thought experiment, in which we are forced to decide between two alternatives. Sometimes experiments like this can illuminate interesting things about our intuitions and beliefs.
You might be on to something--the choice might depend on the way in which the parent or teacher is terrible--stupidity, cruelness, aggresseness, etc.
Right, to me "terrible" implies "intolerable," but that's a shade of meaning. If you mean "pretty sucky" (I do believe that's the technical term), that's a different story.
Of course, the reason I'm not a philosopher is that I hate those sort of thought experiments. Reality is full of choices and shades of gray. Good parents are likely to do what they can to ensure their kids aren't in terrible schools (within their abilities, and some parents certainly have more resources than others, and life ain't fair). I'm sure these experiments have value; I just can't do them.
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