TheSchaef said:
No, because education is clinical knowledge, parenting is primarily experiential knowledge. The fact that they are a parent in the first place is what gives them the advantage. I'm sure you would agree that a person can be learned without attending a traditional school, but who's going to be taken more seriously, the person with the degree or without? Likewise, I'm going to trust the word of the parent over the non-parent because they're the ones who put in the time.
Firstly, I appreciate your thoughtful reply. In many instances, these sorts of discussions can turn ugly very quickly. Civility greatly appreciated.
To the topic: Taking what I've marked in italics, it's getting my point backwards. It's more important to note that a person can go through traditional school and
not be very learned at all. Being in and going through the experience does not guarantee learning. Learning isn't measured by time-on-task, it's measured by assessment.
Assessment can be formal (like taking the driving test, or having a review done by your supervisor). It can also be informal--if I'm cutting people off, failing to use my turn signal, and generally just being a jackass on the road, people can informally assess me as a bad driver. The key to assessment isn't that the test itself is magical. The usefulness is in the
data it generates.
Drawing the distinction between "clinical" and "practical" isn't
quite as useful as we want to make it. We tend to overstate the difference between the two just as often as we understate it. Yes, the experience of
actually teaching/doctoring/parenting/etc. is always very different from the learning.
The difficulty of the experience, however, does not negate the efficacy of the techniques taught in the clinical environment.
The way kids learn behavior is the way they learn behavior. That mechanism functions both in and out of school, and it functions the same way. The difference is in the techniques used to take advantage of that mechanism. Teachers and parents utilize different techniques, depending on the environment, but they're both taking advantage of the same mechanisms in the child's mind.
As a for instance, a parent could be told, "It's not going to do you much good to tell the child how
not to behave if you're not also going to tell the child the correct way. It's must faster to focus on what you want, rather than what you don't want." It's a basic, but very important principle to guiding behavior and learning. Don't tell someone the 1,000 ways
not to do it, when just showing them how will suffice.
Too often, though, a parent will say something like, "Yeah, well when
you have kids, we'll see how easy you think
that is." But no one ever said it's "easy." Just that it's
effective. The fact that there is an easier (but less effective) shortcut doesn't disprove the more effective practice being recommended.
A student is writing a book report, and you tell them, "Read the book carefully. Summarize the plot, including character names. Use complete, grammatically-correct sentences." The student turns in a piece of paper with the title, a bullet list of the characters, and an incorrect plot summary of the book, likely guessed from the title. The report is also entirely constructed of sentence fragments.
As the teacher, you tell them, "This report isn't accurate, and it's unintelligible because the sentences are incomplete. You didn't follow the instructions." To which the student replies, "Yeah, well
your way is harder, and it takes longer. So I'm not going to do it, because it's my paper."
Just because a task is more difficult to do correctly doesn't excuse us for not doing it correctly. Just because
implementing sound parenting advice is harder in practice than it is in theory doesn't mean no one should ever have to do it.
That's the same process that a lot of other people have to go through also. It's part of having a job. But your training is in teaching, so you teach. It doesn't make you qualified to raise a child from birth to adulthood any more than if you took a job as a spot welder. Citing your credentials against the experiential knowledge of actually being a parent is like comparing apples and ducks.
I'm not citing my credentials against the parent. I'm not saying "my training makes me a better parent than their experience." I'm saying that
I am required to demonstrate mastery before I can claim mastery in my job. A plumber has to prove he can plumb before he gets a license to plumb things. A fisherman has to have a license to catch a fish.
The point is that the parent doesn't have to have any experience in order to become a parent. They don't have to take a class, look through a book, read a pamphlet. Nothing. They never have to prove they are effective at the job--only that they're not criminally ineffective at it, and only when being watched.
So, when the school makes some kind of recommendation about how best to
teach the child something (which is certainly our area of expertise), for a parent to just wave us off saying, "You don't have kids, so you don't know," is a cop-out.
Roll over as opposed to what? You can't raise the child in their stead, and once they move on from your grade, you'll never see them again anyway. In the end, a parent is going to do what a parent is going to do, and short of calling Child Services on them for neglect, what is it you're proposing to do?
I'm not. I'm most definitely lamenting a problem to which there is no acceptable solution. My personal solution? I don't want to raise that person's kid. More and more, we as schools are being told to do just that. Character education, rigorous behavior management programs, time and money and after-school care, schools providing
half of a kid's meals, year-'round... If I wanted to raise the kid, my name would be on his birth certificate. I'm all about teaching him stuff, of course! But raising him? No.
I don't want the school to tell the parents how to do their job. I just want the school to be able to put the parents in a position where they
have to do the job. If the kid's misbehaving, we should be allowed to send him home to be dealt with until he's ready to learn. We need to stop picking up the slack for the absentee parents. If that means some people starve, fine. Consequence is the
only dependable teacher.
Various examples defining the middle by the extremes
Nah, I was pretty clear that my examples were extreme. It's just that they're out there. I'm certainly not making any claim that the "majority" of parents are bad. But there are plenty.
I'm not much into schadenfreude, but I do think your examples demonstrate the chickens coming home to roost when it comes to propping up the dregs of society and shielding them with the people who are actually trying to claw their way out of their hole. And as long as people are crucified for wanting to remodel or replace a broken system, expect nothing more than the status quo where people who shouldn't even be a part of this conversation are encouraged to continue negatively impacting all areas of society, and not only the aspect that directly relates to the kids stuck with them as parents.
And this is where I've been going with this. These problem parents no longer need to get
carte blanche just because they're parents. Having the job doesn't mean you can do the job, especially when you didn't have to go through any kind of screening process to get the job. The fact that a kid has survived long enough to go to school doesn't mean "good" parenting is taking place.
We are desperately trying to fix education, and fix society at large. We're placing more accountability on all of our leaders and teachers. We're putting more responsibility on them even as we take away pay and benefits. Every problem that comes up, we tell them to deal with it, whether it's their fault or not. We tell them to be the kickstand for those "dregs" you mentioned.
But no one is going after the parents. The first unit of civilization was the family. The parent, it's first leader and teacher. Parents are the front lines, the ground floor, the keystone, the most important link in the chain, and whatever other metaphor you need to indicate that they are of utmost importance.
Yes, and as I said, those skills give you a specialization in the education of a child. The guarantee you're going to get on parents will never come from a textbook or a certification because again, they are not clinical skills. The reason being a parent makes someone a de facto expert on raising their child is precisely because it is NOT automatic as you suggest. A parent becomes the expert by the very process of being a parent. It's 24-hour, 7-day, 365-a-year on-the-job training, and for the most part, you don't get to quit or ask for a raise or vacation or federal holidays. Putting in the time is what qualifies them, and for the most part, your examples of people who are less qualified than you to be a parent have nothing to do with your expertise, and everything to do with the fact that they are less qualified than you to be a member of society at all. Bad parenting is the least of their troubles; they suffer from bad everything-ing, and therein lies the real problem.
From this last round of quotes/replies, I'm seeing that we're not really disagreeing. We're talking around each other. I'm trying to avoid going to the "They shouldn't even be here" extreme, though. I'm just saying that we need to stop giving them a pass simply because they are parents.
Being on the job
does not mean you're learning a damned thing about the job. You could just be marking hours and collecting a paycheck. And in workplaces with little to no accountability, people do that
all the time. Parenting has
virtually no accountability. As long as the kid's not beaten, naked, or starving, the parent is held as untouchable.
And to the point I've italicized in your quote:
I'm not making the claim that I'm more qualified than them to be a parent. I'm saying that their status as "a parent" does not make them more qualified than anyone else. If they've demonstrated expertise as a parent,
that expertise may well qualify them. But the status itself? No. Because it costs nothing to attain, virtually nothing to keep, and no one checks up on whether it's being earned.
I'm not saying, "I should be able to tell parents how to do it." I'm saying that too many parents completely ignore any recommendations from the school
about a child's learning, simply because, "You're not his parent, so you don't know a thing." Fact is, we've undergone extensive training
and demonstrated mastery in this department (child learning), and as far as we can tell they did what?
To put it in another way, it'd be like someone telling a Klan member that his Klan-member son is a racist, and that Klan member saying, "Well, I'm
white, so that means
I'm the only one qualified to judge whether a
white child is racist."
