The school does not have a monopoly on education and no longer has – has it ever had? – the monopoly of education. Parents teach Diploma of IT their children, brothers and sisters sometimes too, as well as buddies, family friends, grandparents. Added today to these traditional resources is the contribution of audiovisual media and more recently of multimedia and the Internet.
I will limit myself here to the question of the division of labor between the parents and the school. It is often dealt with from the perspective of informing parents, their participation in the management of the school, their rights and duties. We too often forget that the first interaction between parents and teachers takes place through their respective interventions, contradictory or coherent, with the child or adolescent.
Historically, the school has “taken away” their children from the peasant and popular classes Diploma of IT preventing them from working as adults, making “useless mouths”. Compulsory mass education has somehow dispossessed the parents of their children, first as a labor force, secondly by inculcating in them values, a language, knowledge that distanced them from their family and social environment.
They had been educated and had understood that outside of school
In the last third of the 20th century , at least in the industrialized countries, the picture had completely changed. Rare were the parents who did not want their child to go to school. Even if they themselves had not succeeded brilliantly, they had been educated and had understood that outside of school there was little salvation for their children in a society where diplomas are the job key.
The economic crisis has cast a shadow over this picture of massive membership: structural unemployment and poverty in housing estates or certain deprived neighborhoods have eroded the faith of the working classes in schooling. They know that the counterpart of school work – a job, an income and social integration – is less and less guaranteed. How, then, to convince his children that their salvation will come from education? The school therefore finds itself confronted, in certain areas, with resistance from the less advantaged pupils, high absenteeism, incivility and violence in which some parents seem to be complicit, unless they are indifferent or powerless. The alliance between parents and teachers is no longer self-evident.
It is called into question, in a completely different way, by the middle classes, who no longer support the school imposing on their children an education foreign to family values and also rebel against uniform curricula. They ask that the school relay their values or abstain from any inculcation. They also want to have more choice in terms of content, they behave like demanding “school consumers” or investors looking for the best establishments, the best courses, the best diplomas for their children.
Teachers have always dreamed and still dream of parents being docile helpers in the schooling business, putting their children to sleep, supervising their homework, pushing them to prepare for the assessment of diploma of information technology and above all telling them day after day how important it is to work at school, to concentrate, to take knowledge seriously.
Family coalition which always proves the school wrong
Destitute, indifferent or rebellious, all parents are no longer very reliable allies of teachers. They can easily become adversaries if their expectations are disappoint or their values questioned. The “adult team” is falling apart, sometimes replaced by an absence of interlocutor. The family side, sometimes by a family coalition which always proves the school wrong. When the child is badly graded, reprimanded or if he does not receive not all the help the parents feel he is entitled to.
All of this has multiple implications, one of which is aggravation of learning difficulties. It can no doubt become oppressive for a child to come up against the united front of adults, with speeches on. The benefits of school work that do not reveal any flaws. However, if any alliance between parents and teachers disappears, the child who does not want to work. In particular because he encounters difficulties, will have a better chance of escaping intensive and consistent care.
Moreover, the management of parents’ various expectations and the negotiation. With their spokespersons absorb a significant part of the teachers’ energy. They spend more time, for example, justifying their grades or assessments than observing students from a formative perspective. They renounce innovative educational approaches or certain forms of positive discrimination so as not to be expose to criticism and protest from parents.
Authority and respect to firmly support its demands
The empowerment of parents and parents’ associations has another effect: the divergent interests of each are express more openly. Some demand more homework, others their elimination. Some are for the ratings, some against. The same applies to games in class, project approaches, field surveys, group work. Of course, it is the privileged parents who make themselves heard the best and pull the school towards more elitism.
Teachers sometimes dream of returning to the golden age, that time when parents did not meddle. In the teaching profession, but had enough authority and respect to firmly support its demands. It would be better to mourn this more or less mythologized past. And build real partnerships, the only ones likely to achieve two objectives:
- That parents trust the school when it adopts active, constructivist and differentiated pedagogies. Because they understand that they are the condition for effective learning.
- That we increase solidarity between parents and that the most privileged give up demanding everything for their children without worrying about others, because they have grasped that the strengths and talents of teachers must go first and foremost to pupils Diploma of IT who have the no longer need them.
Part of this work falls to teachers, in their close dialogue with parents. However, in the absence of a vigorous policy of encouraging dialogue, accompanied by training. It is not surprising that some teachers invest their strength in mechanisms for defending. Neutralizing families, rather than in a family-school partnership in favor of a coherent educational action. In the 21st century , schools cannot dream of teaching against families, it must explain, negotiate. Admit that the delimitation of territories and the division of labor evolve over the decades and are break down differently. According to age, origin and heterogeneity of school populations. Neighborhood characteristics, or again the organization of parents into combative associations.
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