Why America Demonizes its Teachers -- Part 4: The Role of the Home in Student Learning
One powerful influence on student learning, which federal and state governments refuse to acknowledge, is a student's home life, over which teachers have no control. Students who come from homes conducive to learning usually do well in school, while those who don't come from such homes, generally do poorly.
There are many parents today who do a wonderful job in raising their children in ideal home environments, with the result that their children flourish in school. Would that there were more of these parents!
There are also parents who don't provide such homes, often resulting in problems for their children in school. It is hard to teach children from homes where the life of the mind is disdained or neglected; where there are no books; where parents don't read, or read to their children, or encourage them to read on their own; where a child's curiosity is never piqued by a parent's questions, or by parents discussing ideas within their child's hearing to suggest a larger world outside the home.
It is hard to teach children of helicopter and snowplow parents who infantilize their children by making it impossible for them to grow up, become their own persons, and live their own lives; parents who instill in their children a gargantuan sense of entitlement; parents who refuse to set limits on their children's behavior, wanting to be their friends instead of their parents; parents in denial about their children's behavior, eternally making excuses for them, enabling them to become more uncontrollable year after year, and thereby disabling them to function later in life as mature human beings.
It is hard to teach a fatherless or a motherless child who feels cheated by a parent's absence or loss; a lonely child who feels uprooted by a parent's frequent job relocations and no longer bothers to make friends at school; a child shattered by a parent's drinking or drug problem; a spoiled child bribed by parental guilt-offerings for time and affection rarely bestowed; a defeated child who knows only rejection and has nothing to live for; a frustrated child who can never measure up to a parent's impossibly high expectations; an angry child who lashes out to prove he exists and will make the world pay for his pain.
It is hard to teach children from dysfunctional homes and emotional wastelands; where parents endlessly preach to their children, instead of being role-models after whom children want to pattern their lives; where parents are too busy to do what parents always found time to do in the past, like being parents who explained the Why America Demonizes its Teachers -- Part 4: The Role of the Home in Student Learning | Frank Breslin:
