A Return To Normalcy
Parents As Primary Educators
Dr. Ryan Hanning
In 2020, the American education system underwent its most significant transition since World War II. As spring came, the pandemic forced all education, public, private, lower, and higher to a temporary halt. It has also revealed several truths about education in general and the strengths and weaknesses of the American education system. As schools pivoted and transitioned as best they could to online, remote, and hybrid modes of education, parents attempted to adjust to the new normal. Unlike other abnormalities brought on by the pandemic, the transition to the home being the place of education was actually a return to normalcy, albeit an uncomfortable one for many. With the exception of those who already homeschooled, most parents took on a role that, while inherently belonging to them, is typically not emphasized.
Study after study demonstrates that children learn the most enduring lessons of life from their home, parents, and surrounding family. Despite strong evidence that parental involvement in their children’s education is a decisive factor for success, most parents underestimate their role as primary educators. The answers to questions of origin, purpose, destiny, forgiveness, self-worth, etc. may be reinforced in the classroom, but they take root in the home. With parents considering their options this fall, and in light of the momentary reminder of the home as a place of education, as well the limits of our modern education system, it’s worth reviewing the important role parents play in their children’s education and how this plays out in the various educational settings they choose for their children.
Parents Matter
The emerging collection of anecdotal and peer-reviewed studies focused on student participation and achievement reveals one consistent truth: parents matter. Children whose parents are more involved in their education have better attendance, higher grades, and above-average graduation rates. This type of correlation is to be expected. It only follows reason that parents who are more involved in their children’s education are more likely to seek out better schools, ensure participation, help with homework, etc. Like all correlatives, it does not prove causation. But while there are many factors to a child’s success in school, these studies do reveal a deep truth about the instrumental role parents play, a role that is often acknowledged but less often seriously engaged by modern education.
In the stripped away schooling of this past year, students without parental intervention were left to their own devices, figuratively and literally. The current crisis and the response in Spring 2020, more fully exposed the significant equity gap for lower-income families. Many of these studies confirm that students from lower-income families are less likely to have two parents at home and less likely to have access to the internet and the devices that remote education depends on — but this is only part of the story. Students of lower-income families whose parents took an active role as primary educators fared much better overall. This includes single-parent homes, which now make up twenty-five percent of households of school-aged children in the US (the highest rate in the world). They more successfully advocated for the resources they needed, and often overcame any gaps by taking the onus of education upon themselves. At the same time, these studies indicate that, while more affluent families with greater access to resources did not suffer in the same way, there were similar losses in retention and performance among affluent students whose parents outsource their role as primary educators rather than embrace it.
Four Golden Calves
As the principal author of one of these studies (The Impact of Coronavirus on K-12 School Attendance, Performance and Culture, San Juan Diego Institute, May 18th, 2020), I find this correlative between parent involvement and student achievement illustrative of the deeper challenges our current educational system faces. It also provides a context in which to create more equitable and effective models of education. For far too long, parents have outsourced the education of their children in ways that damage, rather than build up, their role as primary educators. This has been to our detriment, and we continue to see the failures of our current system exposed, especially during this time of crisis. The modern education construct is based on some failed assumptions of social engineering and pragmatism. Many parents experienced these first-hand as they were confronted with trying to manage, replicate, or intervene with the many misguided norms of modern education while educating their children at home. These failed assumptions include several golden calves that have deserved smelting for some time.
1st Idol:
Pre-eminence of Pragmatic and Technical Knowledge
The first idol is the pre-eminent focus on pragmatic and technical knowledge. For most of the history of western civilization, education was built upon the foundations of knowing how to think and communicate. This was the basis of self-discovery and personal development as well as civil dialogue and civic duty. The idea was that the subjects of grammar, logic, and rhetoric were the basis for reading, writing, speaking, and thinking rationally, which were necessary for more advanced subjects of math, music, astronomy, etc. This approach was represented in the classical trivium and quadrivium model which undergirded nearly all educational systems in the western world. Even those systems not linked to our Greco-Roman and Judeo-Christian heritage, followed similar courses of thought. To be educated meant to know who one was, and how one was called to live in this world. How different western perspectives are today, when to be educated means to be good at something and / or employable. Having skills and being employable are very important, but they are insufficient to provide a vision for the whole of education, or the whole of life. In other words, education focused on purely practical, efficient, or economic ends, can too easily forget the important foundations upon which all good work is founded.
To be educated meant to know who one was, and how one was called to live in this world.
Sadly, this focus invades private and home education as well, where the human foundation of education, the formation of the moral imagination, and the development of virtue can be sidelined by a pressure to compete with public schools. In the words of one of my former student’s fathers, “I am happy that he got a good grade, but is my son any less of a jerk after your class?” The humorous question was an honest one. You have given them more knowledge, but have you directed them towards what is good, beautiful, and true? While it might not be my job as a teacher to prevent his son from becoming a villain, I certainly shouldn’t add to the problem. In this regard, the shortcomings of the modern education system are perhaps best summarized by C.S. Lewis’ Abolition of Man, Reflections on Education with Special Reference to the Teaching of English which opens with the darkly humorous stanza, “We laugh at honour and are shocked to find traitors in our midst. We castrate and bid the geldings be fruitful.” If you prefer a slightly more modern, cinematographic allusion, in the movie Jurassic Park, Dr. Ian Malcom (played by Jeff Goldblum) accuses the creators of the park of forgetting the dangers of technical ability bereft of reason and humanity when he tells them, “Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn’t stop to think if they should.”
As primary educators, we must provide a foundation for our children built upon an adequate understanding of their dignity. They were created for something more than just to do some thing or to have a high-paying job. We must help them answer the fundamental questions of life — their origin, purpose, destiny — and inspire them to seek virtue and meaning in life, to be willing to ask the questions of “why” not just the utilitarian question of “how.” We must demand that those we trust to educate our children see the value in that foundation. This is not a particularly religious proposition. Much of what is good, beautiful, and true of humanity is part of our universal heritage as humans. Common decency, basic objective morality of good and bad behavior, and the consequences of such actions are important life lessons for both the physical and emotional life of the child. In private, religious schools, we should teach, inspire, and hold students accountable to moral behavior becoming of who they are called to be. In public or charter schools, we should teach them the civic morals of integrity, civility, justice, cooperation, and the common good.
2nd Idol:
Overemphasis on Materialism and Empiricism
The second idol of modern education is related to the first: an overemphasis on materialism and empiricism. While the study of the material world is indeed the rightful domain of the sciences, not everything is material. Our thoughts, our hopes, our ambitions —those things that are so human that we rarely actually think of them — are also the domain of education. Science, properly understood, is the study of observable, repeatable, material phenomena. It is an excellent way to learn about the physical world, but it is not the only way to learn about truth.
Most of the college students I have taught suffer from a type of anxiety that comes from being told their entire life that people can know everything about the material world, but nothing about the immaterial world. Things like purpose, destiny, happiness, love, meaning, or fulfillment either remain a mystery or are insufficiently explained by some physical phenomenon. Working for years at a large public research institution, I heard all the proposed materialist explanations. Often, they play out like this:
Materialist: “‘Love’ is merely a stimulus-response to endorphins in the brain that have been meticulously conscripted by eons of natural selection by which people with more developed pituitary glands had higher procreation and reproductive rates due to an associated willingness to form interpersonal relationships with successive partners.”
Anxious College Student: “Dude, I just wanted to know if I should ask her to the dance.”
All this is to say, that the current preference for the inductive methods of reasoning, the focus on technique, and interaction with the physical world, does not simultaneously equip us for the deeper and more important questions of life. I tell all my freshman students that if, after four years of college, they leave with a deep knowledge in their degree field, but know nothing more than when they started about who they are, what fills their heart with joy and breaks it with sadness, and nothing more about how to make a gift of themselves to others, they will have failed. The same is true for every grade and every age.
As primary educators, we must show our children that the world in all of its goodness is more than just the sum of its parts. We must inspire humility, awe and wonder, and appreciation and stewardship of the natural world. As parents, our children should know that we are as excited for them to discover their mission in life as they are. An educational system that overly relies on empiricism is more likely to treat our children as problems to be solved, not as learners to be accompanied towards truth. Its focus becomes how to more efficiently deliver the content, or teach the skill. This, while important, cannot outweigh the veracity and meaning of what they are being taught. We live in a technological world, and skills and technique matter, but are exercised well to the extent to which the people that use them have the ability to guide their use towards what is really good, beautiful, and true.
As parents, our children should know that we are as excited for them to discover their mission in life as they are.
3rd Idol:
Superiority of National and Federal Norms
The third idol is the idea that national and federal norms represent and/or exceed the regional realities, economic and otherwise, of a local place. Certainly, as discussed in the previous paragraphs, there are basic human norms that every person needs as well as basic knowledge that all citizens must have to support a constitutional democracy, but to federalize the bulk of education on the precept that everyone needs the same thing, or —even worse— to defend the practice of violating subsidiarity under the pretext of making sure no one is left out, is unbecoming of a nation whose motto is e pluribus unam.
Despite the best of intentions, federal norms often leave more children behind and less equipped to meet the actual realities of the places in which they grow-up and, God-willing, will continue to live, work and raise families. The goal should not be for children of pig-farmers in Iowa to know all the same things as the children of stock traders in New York. Chances are, kids in Manhattan may be offended by a field trip to the slaughterhouse, and kids in Des Moines may not be served well by a day at Wall Street. If such a thing were beneficial to these children, their parents can provide the opportunity. It should not fall on our broken educational system to make universal decisions in place of what competent local authorities can decide. It is naive to believe that children are better off if they all know the same stuff, especially if that stuff is not determined by human nature, but instead by shifting economic and political realities. Our society has rejected the perennial teaching of the trivium and quadrivium as nostalgic, inefficient, and outdated, yet builds a standardized educational system on fluid and changing social norms.
As primary educators, you are right to ask what is valuable to all people, to all citizens, as well as particular to your family, your region, your state. What things ought your children learn that will make them a better member of your community? As the primary educator, you are constantly asking what your child needs, and what things will matter for them when they come to more fully realize their ambitions. As your partner in education, the school, the curriculum, etc. should speak to these needs. You are well within your right to advocate for them. Your taxes provide these services., Your elected officials, or their delegates, are meant to serve the people they represent.
4th Idol:
Bureaucratic Decisions
The final golden calf is a body of bureaucratic decisions we often hide behind that are supposedly made for the benefit of the child. The fact is, many of the decisions that our society has made and continues to make about how our schools educate, have been made for economic, and not educational, considerations. While most of these decisions are not necessarily bad for our society, we cannot say in good conscience that they are genuinely good for our children. The younger starting age for schooling, for example, may account for better test-taking skills in later years, but the decision to educate children earlier was based largely on an economic system that necessitates two working parents, not on a real dilemma in test-taking ability. A three-and-a-half-year old is likely better off at home with his or her parents, than in a class of strangers. The same reasoning was followed regarding the length of day, all day preschool, co-ed classes, etc. In fact, much of the educational research that attempts to justify these things simply points to gains within the educational system itself, not to benefits experienced by children. Meanwhile, other data shows the real cost to students and families. The same is true for programs that are applied to all children equally so as not to discriminate against those who do not need it.
A clear example of this type of thinking was a summer food program in Phoenix. It is noble, good, and just that schools that ensure the nutritional health of children during the school year should continue to do so during the summer. But one Phoenix school district decided that, in order to not require needy students to sign up for the program, they would continue to offer free food service throughout the summer to all students. The net result was that the local elementary school fed affluent families and threw away what they could not send home with staff. This type of waste whether it be of food, books, devices, or services, is rampant. It does not help our children, and it further directs resources away from those who need it most. Let’s face it, it is okay to make prudent decisions that may negatively affect our children for the purpose of some greater good; it is not okay to pretend we are making these decisions on their behalf.
As an educator, and as one who continues to teach educators, I can attest to the truth that good teachers suffer from these fallacies as much as their students. Many teachers succeed at educating our children despite the environment created by the edu-crats who pursue a never-realized utopia, forever dependent on just a little more power and a little more funding. These challenges are not the fault of the teacher, but rather that of a system that has combined well-funded good intentions with bad anthropology.
Despite the failings of our current system, these false idols are vehemently defended. We struggle to imagine what the alternative might look like. It is indeed hard to imagine. Parents often feel that they cannot and should not attempt to compete with what is provided by the “expert” in the classroom, but fail to recognize that well-ordered classrooms simply mimic what families naturally provide on their own: a structure for cooperation, communication, and learning. To be clear, all forms of organized schooling (public, charter, private, and homeschool) have distinctive benefits, but these benefits do not need to come at the expense of usurping the parents’ role as primary educators. One of the central findings of our study was that schools that take seriously their partnership with parents, and that honor parents as the primary educator of their children, performed better overall. Good teachers know this, and they succeed precisely because of their willingness to serve as paternal (or more often than not) maternal partners, not surrogates, but real partners — representing what the parent wants most for their children, which is not just to pass the class, but to also become more of who they are called to be. Many successful schools interact with parents in ways that inspire and empower them to serve as primary educators with greater skill and confidence. Many of these schools coincidently don’t succumb to the extremes of the four challenges outlined above. They approach the enterprise of education and the families they serve with less hubris and more humility.
Ultimately, the data supports the axiom: children learn from their parents. Parents always want what is best for their children, even those who don’t always know how to give their children what they need. After all, this truth is ancient. It is even biblical. Jesus asked the crowd, “Is there anyone among you who, if your child asks for bread, will give a stone? Or if the child asks for a fish, will give a snake?” (Matt 7:9-10) Good parents want what is best, and seek to provide the fundamental goods of food, water, shelter, and education for their children.
In today’s world, most parents will not allow anyone — be it government, neighbors, or in-laws — to tell them how to provide the goods of food, water, and shelter for their children. Only in severe situations does the common good demand intervention. Much of our childrens’ education, however, is determined not by parents, nor by teachers, nor even the common good, but by other, less fundamental, factors. And they are made by more remote and separate decision makers. These decision makers are not nameless men in black suits, sitting in smoke-filled rooms, hatching nefarious plots. Nevertheless, the well-intentioned guidance of ‘experts’ has slowly eroded parents’ God-given and natural role in the rearing and educating of their own children. A return to normalcy is needed. The data demands it, and our children and families deserve it. Perhaps this is why forty percent of public school parents said that they lost confidence in the education system and were considering homeschooling in the fall of 2020.
What is the solution?
The family is the locus of our development. Our first steps, our first words, our first lessons are learned in the home. How we relate to others, build virtue, eat food, worship, play, forgive, and love are all learned for good or for naught in the home. Parents play a central, enduring, and irreplaceable role as the primary educators of their children. The way parents fulfill this role is a matter of prudence, but it is never passive, nor can it be abdicated to another. Our society must radically rethink how our school systems partner with and assist parents in this role, for the benefit of the child, the family, and the community. This crisis will have been wasted if it does not cause us to want more for our children, our families, and our nation.
As everyone seeks to fix the problems caused and exposed by the pandemic, governments, philanthropists, policymakers, and districts should be seeking to increase efforts to meaningfully support parents as primary educators. This will require some radical changes, and will challenge existing norms of the pragmatic paradigm that undergirds most modern education. Furthermore, parents should forcefully reclaim their rightful role. For some, this will mean more involvement in their public school to ensure that what their children are learning is consistent with the needs of the family and community. For others, it will mean partnering with their private school teachers and administrators to re-think how the school can engage, empower, and support the home as the locus of education. For others, it will mean taking home education more seriously, whether that be education delivered remotely to the home by others, or more traditional forms of homeschooling where the parent serves as the principal teacher. Regardless of how we decide to best school our children, this return to normalcy will mean reclaiming our children as our own, prayerfully discerning what they need, and once again becoming their first teachers.
Hear, my child, your father’s instruction,
and do not reject your mother’s teaching;
for they are a fair garland for your head,
and pendants for your neck.
-Proverbs 1:8-9
and do not reject your mother’s teaching;
for they are a fair garland for your head,
and pendants for your neck.
-Proverbs 1:8-9
