2009.10.25
Editorial: Parents and education
To make sure every child graduates
Schools alone can't teach your kids. Parents, most of it is on you.
If you haven't yet looked at today's Horizon front, please take a few moments now to read, "Students achieve if 'fathers kick their butts,'" then rejoin us here.
The message delivered by Patrick Welsh, an English teacher at T.C. Williams High School in Alexandria, is powerful and should be repeated in every home until it sinks in: Parents have the greatest influence in determining whether their children will do well in school.
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Kicking butt does not an education make. I truly belive that until we stop running schools like jails and instead concentrate on making them interesting for the children there will be no improvment. Children percieve the teacher's attitude toward them and if the teacher does not like them, they sense that. Accordingly, they rebel and cause trouble. They cause trouble when they are lost and can't keep up, they cause trouble when they are bored. Smaller classes, more interesting classes and less stupid rules will help get the child interested. We expect children to sit in a hard wooden desk for 6 1/2 hours a day, listen to a monologue on an uninteresting subject and then go home and do homework on it. Yet as adults we can't even make it through a 20 minute sermon in a churchpew. At 5:00 we are headed to a bar to forget about work. Why do we expect our children to out perform the adult?
Comment by Richard — October 25, 2009 @ 6:45 pm
Abolish public education.
Comment by Glen Franklin Koontz — October 25, 2009 @ 9:15 pm