It’s easy in our busy world to underestimate the task of teaching. It’s even easier to overlook the nature of the school system. The school is a tiny community that reflects the general structure and social values of the United States as a whole. Schools are a valuable necessity that can easily be taken for granted. Overall, they have all of the resources, equipment, technology, and departmental staff members needed to reliably educate children. School counselors and other professionals are always available to help kids who have valid special needs. Educators are formally qualified to teach kids, while parents generally don’t have teaching degrees. The school system is the main institution that prepares children to make the transition the adult world once they are grown. If anything, schools should recognize the scope of influence they have on our kids and take more responsibility in some areas.
Parents, on the other hand, seldom take a regular and vigorous interest in their child’s education. Keep in mind that I’m speaking of millions of parents, not just a few thousand who may be the exception. The U.S. is far bigger than those exceptional households. The majority of parents are genuinely too busy with work and the relentless pressures of many other adult issues to even take their kids out dinner or local functions, much less routinely put in the time to educate them. We care about their grades and we give them our best encouragement, but most of us seldom stop our whole lives to zoom in on the details of our children’s tedious school assignments. We are fortunate to have a mandatory school system in place that is managed by people who devote their whole lives to the painstaking, sometimes drudging, cause of transferring information from textbooks into student’s minds. If a parent has only one child and doesn’t work a full-time job, than it’s likely that he or she will have every opportunity to take a regular and vigorous interest in the child’s education. But a parent’s availability is not a guarantee that the parent will get regularly involved. And that shouldn’t be considered a parental flaw because not everyone is cut out to teach on an academic level. Many excellent parents make terrible teachers. Some parents make good teachers. The point is that there are all kinds of parents out there and t would be inaccurate to say that all of them actually qualify to solely control their child’s education.
As it is, no expectant parent goes to a prenatal
