With Education Minister Dr Rupert Roopnaraine seemingly seeking to incrementally strengthen the foundation of an education system that remains deficient in various critical respects, this may be an opportune time to raise ‒ not for the first time ‒ the matter of the need for the Ministry of Education to effectively embrace parents as genuine stakeholders in the education process rather than have them remain on the periphery as many of them have been for a number of years, in a condition of indifference and sometimes even hostility to what transpires in the places where their children receive their education.
We had raised this matter during the tenures of the two previous ministers of Education, pointing out that less than sufficient attention was being paid to the role that parents can and should play in ensuring that their children are best positioned to benefit from the education being delivered to them in schools. We have made the point that many of the problems in the teaching/learning process and in the education system as a whole had to do with the failure to get parents and teachers/schools to work together, and we had even recommended consideration of a contractual obligation underpinned by a compulsoriness in the parent/school relationship; an arrangement which, on the one hand, commits parents to delivering into the education system children who are, on the whole, receptive to education delivery and on the other, schools and teachers who are both contractually and morally bound to deliver to their charges the best education possible.
Nowhere is the virtue of such a ‘contract’ more evident than in the process of seeking to tackle what has become the huge headache of general indiscipline including violence in schools and amongst schoolchildren. Loathe as we might be to admit it (and this newspaper has said so before) violence in schools and among schoolchildren is often an ‘export’ from the homes and communities, whence they come, in which cases the deviant children are usually contemptuous of school rules and disinclined to adhere to them. These forms of behaviour, one might add, are often buttressed by parents who, regrettably, are themselves disinclined to comply with what one might call good behaviour. Indeed, there have been quite a few cases of parents who are prepared to justify and even assertively defend their children’s deviant behaviour.
The upshot of this has been that not only have some schools and teachers taken a hands-off posture in the matter of seeking to curb deviant behaviour amongst children, but the Ministry of Education itself has been decidedly leaden-footed in taking a strong hand in the matter, a circumstance that has allowed for bullyism and intimidation and various other forms of indiscipline to flourish in some schools, leaving the worst elements among the school population to do more or less as they please.
This newspaper has commented too on the importance of strong and committed Parent-Teacher Associations (PTAs). One of the more important roles of parents is to endorse and help to reinforce the legitimacy of school rules by laying down the law at home in relation to issues like regular attendance and punctuality, respect for teacher authority, respect for colleagues at school, completion of assignments and homework and respect for school property. Where these virtues form part of a regimen of home orientation they are more likely than not to find their way into the schools.
It is in these areas that the PTA can probably help most. Where parents are embraced through PTAs as genuine partners in the process, they are more likely to contribute in the aforementioned ways. Unfortunately, there is more than sufficient evidence to suggest that the effectiveness of PTAs varies from school to school, the sad fact being that the interest of both parents and teachers (including heads of schools) varies from one instance to the next. One might add that we have seen no really persuasive evidence of a strong push on the part of the Ministry of Education to have head teachers attach a far greater element of importance to the PTA as a tool for enhancing the relationship between school and home, and in the final analysis enhancing the effectiveness of the teaching/learning process.
Part of the reason for the lack of success of the PTA across the board has to do with the various parent excuses (business at work has become the most fashionable one) for lack of participation in PTAs. It is, to say the least, disturbing, that schools should have an obligation to deliver education to children in circumstances where the parents of those children demonstrate a studied indifference to what goes on in schools or how their children are faring. At the very least some mechanism should be put in place to let those parents know that their indifference is both disturbing and counterproductive.
There is a great deal more that needs to be done to rebuild an education system that has, in several respects, been in a condition of decline for several years. The magnitude of the rebuilding challenge is of such an order that it has to be tackled incrementally. There is a strong case for asserting that seriously strengthening the parent/school/teacher relationship is perhaps as good a place as any to start.
