Parents Must Bear Their Share of Responsibility

To The Editor:
It is dismaying to hear adults in their judgments hold a single teacher accountable for the academic achievements of 25 students while holding 50 parents accountable for the academic achievements of not one. This lopsided proportioning of responsibility ignores one of the primary parental obligations in society; the preparation of children for the adult world they will one day enter, an effort in which school teachers were intended to serve as part time assistants.
Of those who keep themselves from involvement in their children’s education, some do so wrongly believing they have no help to offer. Education today, in many ways remains similar to what it has long been. Its measurable attribute still mainly consists of written information being placed before a student who then transfers it to an invisible repository in his or her mind from which, later, in a reverse process, is extracted and put back into writing as answers to test questions.
Consider, as an example, a parent’s potential contribution to a child’s mastering of the times table. The teacher, at first, writes six times six equals 36. Some days later the teacher converts the equation into an inquiry asking, “What does six times six equal? All things being equal, those students who have had the equation repeated often to them by parents are more likely to respond with 36 than students whose exposure to the equation was restricted to the classroom. The positive contribution of parental involvement with this one subject can be equally helpful in others; in learning the formulas of science, the words of English, and the events of history.
Shifting responsibility from parent to school entails several costs, the most obvious being the demand it places on the public wallet for additional service that function as a parent’s replacement in education. A. curious side note to this responsibility issue, is the interest it generates in political figures. Perhaps, because teachers are few and parents are many, politicians seem eager to spend generously of voice and ink to hurl reprimands at the perceived failings of school teachers and officials. However, when presented with an opportunity to distribute correctives to neglectful parents, that strong voice goes quiet, the pen dries up.
Testifying to this assertion is our representatives’ mute reaction to the needed, but misdirected pressure, now being applied to teachers to become party time “pastry police” in a school project seeking to slow the expanding circumferences of students caused by long term overfeeding.
RAY LEWIS
Corbin City