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AbiolaFasehunFirstPaper 6 - 10 Jul 2012 - Main.RohanGrey
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Unearthing Myths about Urban Education, Unveiling The Power of the Family | | | Thank you for this personal and insightful piece. I am curious as to your thoughts regarding the role of community in not only child development, but in parenting itself. As i discuss with colleagues and friends about children and ideas for improving the social bonds that form the basis of communities, I regularly come across a mentality that parenting is a "natural right," and that the best thing that society can do is provide basic support and step back to allow parents to "fulfill their role" as the guides of their children's lives. For me, this idea that every person (or couple) is naturally born with the all skills required to parent is as equally flawed as the idea that children can be lifted out of their conditions by education alone. But how can we expect parents to reach out an ask for help when they need it if society is simultaneously telling them that good parents should be able to do it without any help? When state child services only become involved in cases of abuse and neglect, what incentive does any parent have to reach out for help to any public system? The fear of being labelled "negligent" or losing one's child after reporting an problem at home is hardly unjustified when ACS and/or DHS devote their services almost exclusively to responding to allegations of poor parenting, rather than developing an ongoing dialogue with parents of all demographics and competencies. | |
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> | Rohan, | | | You raised interesting questions regarding the complexity of the issue. Talking about what happens in the home or how one culture raises their children verses another remains taboo. But I wonder how much of the idea, that it is a parent's natural right to raise a child, has been hijacked by American idealism? There are some things that a decent human being (let alone a parent) should never allow another to go through (for example, the reference I made above to a student that was forced to sleep outside). As your comment alludes to, there is no excuse for this type of parenting. I believe that a cultural change needs to happen in homes and can occur without taking the right to parent away, but could work to enhance parenting. For example, if a parent is not able to be at home when a child arrives from school, what kind of mechanisms can be put in place to ensure that the child is completing his or her homework? When a teacher attempts to create a plan to get a student back on track, how can a parent support a teacher as opposed to challenging why any help is needed? Such ideas may sound so simple (I dare say even silly to some), but so many of the kids that I worked with were unsupervised at home and would come to school everyday having completed none of their assignments. If this ritual occurs for a majority of the school year, for most children, no academic growth can be achieved. For a cultural change to happen members of the community can and should get involved in helping others where they may fall short, while encouraging parents to take ownership.
A few years ago Bill Cosby publicly addressed what he viewed to be the ills of education in black America. His words were greeted with a backlash. Many African-Americans believed he was a traitor and unqualified to speak of a type of life he knew nothing about, others believed his comments were an example of a double standard. Bill Cosby's ultimate message was that African-Americans needed to "take the neighborhood back", an interesting concept that extends to your point. Bill Cosby's call for action was a call to a collective, not to individuals. I believe we begin a dangerous game when a community remains silent and allows parents to feign ignorance. Although so much of parenting and a communities culture is learned behavior (i.e. fear in the system), at what point does the cycle end? | |
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> | Hi Abiola,
I really like this idea: "For a cultural change to happen members of the community can and should get involved in helping others where they may fall short, while encouraging parents to take ownership." - I think this perfectly sums up the right approach, however I'm not sure you can resolve it with your earlier point that "There are some things that a decent human being (let alone a parent) should never allow another to go through" without stepping outside the realm of inherent and unconditional rights (which is probably a more accurate phrasing of what I meant by "natural rights"). The messy question at the bottom of this, in my view, is whether we should assume parents are absolutely competent until they prove otherwise, or initially approach them as participants in a team of child-raisers who are entitled to take the dominant decision-making role whenever they are able to. I think the rhetorical similarity between the first position and the criminal law doctrine of "innocent until proven guilty" explains much of social resistance to the latter position - we tend to view an assumption of weakness or finite competence as equivalent to an assumption of fault, when as every educator knows it's really the start of a dialogue rather than the end.
I envisage a policy similar to drivers licenses, albeit with a "bundle of sticks" approach to defining competency rather than the more binary system of license/no-license. We set the starting position at assumption of incompetence, but simultaneously acknowledge the desirability of self-autonomy and construct a supportive (rather than judgmental) educational-licensing scheme that strives to ensure everyone who wants to and is able achieves competence. This is the very essence of paternalism ("maternalism," perhaps?), but most accept its wisdom in the context of restricting access to public roads to those who have already passed minimum competency standards. Presumably, this is due to the high levels of risk involved in driving, to others as well as one's self. But why is this risk greater than in the case of child-rearing? One ton metal boxes that can move at 100mph can be dangerous, but hardly more so than eighteen years of neglectful parenting. I fail to see why we protect victims of the latter less than the former simply because the victim and perpetrator come from the same bloodline.
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