Should Local Schools Be Surprised That Parents Want Clarity?
Educational ideology should be explicit, not unspoken
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I am picking up hints that people are annoyed at parents for desiring clarity about what their kids are taught at schools. I’ve seen it in comments from school leaders, school board members, politicians, and citizens on social media.
Don’t get me wrong. I have zero tolerance for parents acting violently at school board meetings, making threats, refusing to follow meeting rules needed to maintain order, or dismissing lawful health orders schools are required to follow.
I am also not insinuating that in our pluralistic, public education system, that every parent can control every aspect of what their child is taught in public schools. If parents want total control of their child’s education, they may have to homeschool or at least look for an option that better aligns with their own values.
As a parent of six children though, I am moderately annoyed by the suggestion that parents should just butt out when it comes to their kid’s education.
While parents may not control what is taught in school, they at least deserve to have clarity about a school’s goals, beliefs, and methods.
Education is not neutral
Education as a practice is imbued with beliefs, goals, and methodologies to achieve those ends.
Somewhere along the way, it appears Americans have been lulled into a sense that school buildings are neutral. “School” is simply the place we send our kids to get an education that is a necessary step to life success. (This represents one educational philosophy I will discuss below).
We treat our kids as though they are simply “thinking things” who are sent to places of instruction (“schools”) that fill their little minds with the appropriate dose of academic content.
Education has been reduced to one highly rationalistic lens.
But children are not just thinking things. Kids have minds, bodies, emotions, and a heart (sometimes known by various groups as a soul or spirit).
Children think, feel, pulse with energy, believe, have the potential to be inspired, get depressed, dream, and hope.
Kids are far more than just “brains-on-a-stick.”
“What if, instead of starting from the assumption that human beings are thinking things, we started from the conviction that human beings are first and foremost lovers? What if you are defined not by what you know but by what you desire? What if the center and the seat of the human person is found not in the heady regions of the intellect but in the gut-level regions of the heart?” (see James KA Smith’s “You Are What You Love”)
Education is the art of helping children learn and acquire knowledge, skills, values, habits, and beliefs. An education is about more than learning to think the right way or to perform the right skills.
Education is about learning to love the right things in the right way toward the right end.
I can still recall my 4th grade public school teacher, Mr. McCarron, walking our classroom through an exercise on blue eyes and brown eyes. The simple lesson that day taught me for a brief moment what it felt like to be excluded based on something I could not control: the color of my eyes. I was being taught to love inclusion over exclusion. He instructed my mind but also molded my heart to reject racism. The lesson was formative.
Education is not neutral. Schools are not neutral brain-dump zones, nor should they be. School systems and educators have goals, beliefs about children as learners, and ideas about the role teachers play in the process.
Schools are in the business of forming children.
As we all wake up to this reality in 2021, there are two observations that are worthy of consideration. First, local schools should not be surprised that parents want clarity about what their children are being taught. Second, schools should be eager to make plain their educational ideology and philosophy.
Educational partnership is enhanced by school clarity
Our local schools and school boards have unfortunately become heated battlegrounds in our nation’s endless culture wars. I covered this terrain in a piece called The Ideological Battle for American Schools.
Parents have a right to know and understand what their children are being taught. Parents deserve clarity.
Schools should be forthright about their educational philosophy and methodology. This might require boosting communications to families.
Parents should not have to dig to discover a district’s mission, vision, or values. If parents are constantly shocked or surprised by what is happening at school, then school leaders may need to self-critically ask if communications are sufficient.
I recall my own parents getting involved in a sex education lesson when I was in elementary school. The school communicated clearly with my parents about the subject and welcomed involvement.
A public educator told me recently how their school keeps a list of things they know about students (specifically sexuality matters) but deliberately hide these from parents. I am not aware that this is widespread practice. There may be cases where such a practice is valid for reasons of safety or privacy. It does raise troubling questions though about the relationship between the school and parents. I wonder if parents know about such practices.
Schools also deserve positive parental support and partnership. Education works best when teacher and parent are in alignment on goals for kids.
Parents need to be engaged. Teachers should not have to beg for a parent to be involved. Yes, I understand this is not easy for all parents given household makeup, job schedules, parental capacity (i.e. health issues, mental health status, etc.). But zero engagement from some responsible adult in the household is not acceptable partnership.
Parents and caretakers should pay heed to communications that come from the school whether via paper or digital format. Parents should attend parent-teacher conferences and listen to what educators have to say. Teachers are partners with parents in the formation of their children.
Parents should not be quick to make hasty accusations. It has become common practice for parents to side with their kids and to quickly accuse adults of being liars. I am not suggesting that adults are always truthful. Adults are human too. Generally speaking, the vast majority of our nation’s teachers entered the profession because they desire to positively impact children.
Parents don’t have a right to act violently or to be disruptive of public meetings. Public spaces require order and process. We have democratic processes such as school board elections that enable parents to have a measure of influence on the direction public school systems take.
Our public spaces function better when parents, students, teachers, school leaders, and board members treat each other with the kind of respect required by the Golden Rule.
Schools function better when they clearly articulate goals that call for parent engagement.
Every school has a philosophy of education
If we, as a society, hope to get at the root of the battles over schools, then we need to dig a good bit deeper into the various visions (i.e. philosophies, ideologies) around which schools are organized.
Author Michael Schiro, in his book Curriculum Theory: Conflicting Visions and Enduring Concerns, cites the following:
An ideology is a collection of ideas, a comprehensive vision, a way of looking at things, or a worldview that embodies the way a person or a group of people believes the world should organized and function. It is “a certain ethical set of ideals, principles, doctrines, myths or symbols of a social movement, institution, class, or large group that explains how society should work, and offer some political and cultural blueprint for a certain social order” (Wikipedia, n.d., ¶ 1). (Schiro, 9)
Every public, private, charter, cyber, and even homeschool parent has a philosophy of education, what Schiro calls an ideology. One could begin analyzing a school’s ideology by asking the following:
What is education? Is education the process of cultural transmission, individual self-discovery, preparation for the workforce, or equipping for cultural transformation?
What is the end goal or vision of what a graduate should look like? My own school calls this the “Portrait of a Graduate.” Who do we want this student to be in terms of character and virtue? What knowledge and skills do we hope they will have attained?
What do schools believe about students? What is their capacity, potential, and even value? Are there economic assumptions (i.e. humans exist to provide societal/economic value) or religious assumptions (i.e. humans are image bearers of God) about students?
What do schools believe about the role of the teacher? Are they facilitator or model/exemplar? Is their goal to guide the learner to self-discovery or to transmit truth and cultural values? Are they partner to parents or an agent of correcting faulty parental beliefs?
What do schools believe about the role of parents or caretakers? Should they be engaged and involved or keep their distance until requested? How does a school interpret in loco parentis (Latin for “in place of the parent”)?
Today’s parents get frustrated with why schools teach math or reading differently from the way they learned and why kids don’t learn cursive anymore.
Many are increasingly outraged over subjects such as history, racism, sexuality and how these are taught to students.
Education is not neutral. Education is a formative process with a vision and methods that flow from various philosophies of education.
Education has deeply embedded beliefs about a wide range of topics. What does your kid learn about ambition from your school? That might seem like a strange question, but can you answer the question? Is naked ambition neutral or something that should have guardrails? What kind of guardrails?
What about the role and purpose of money or the value of sports?
Does your public school respect religious belief in a pluralistic way (i.e. respect does not mean to promote religious belief) or does it quietly and subtly discourage religious belief as superstitious, anti-science nonsense?
We could all afford to wake up to the reality that education is fully of deeply embedded beliefs and presuppositions that come from established philosophies of education.
Four competing ideologies of education
All schools are not created equal. Schiro’s Curriculum Theory: Conflicting Visions and Enduring Concerns outlines four competing ideologies or visions of education. He writes,
Each of the four visions of curriculum embodies distinct beliefs about the type of knowledge that should be taught in schools, the inherent nature of children, what school learning consists of, how teachers should instruct children, and how children should be assessed. Each vision has its own value system; its own purposes of education; its own meanings for words (e.g., Does knowledge consist of understandings, skills, meanings, or values?); its own heroes, whose beliefs it repeats; and its own villains, whose beliefs it rails against. (Schiro, 2)
Each of the four visions of education has proponents, curriculum and curricula publishers, teaching methods, and assessment tools.
I will briefly outline (though inadequately for space) the four visions here for the reader (using Schiro’s categories) in hopes that basic clarity is gained in classifying the various school options a community might have available.
Scholar Academic ideology (also known as Liberal Arts, Classical, Perennialism). Schiro suggests the focus here is on the transmission of historically established and important accumulated cultural knowledge categorized by academic disciplines (i.e. history, philosophy, science, etc.). Chris Perrin, in his publication, What is Classical Education? writes, “It is a long tradition of education that has emphasized the seeking after of truth, goodness, and beauty and the study of the liberal arts and the great books.” Teachers are model scholars and exemplars in this model. Students are encouraged to develop language (often Latin is studied), formal logic, and skills of rhetoric to become effective communicators. Some models emphasize growth in curiosity, wonder, and the cultivation of virtue.
Social Efficiency ideology (also known as Essentialism). Schiro suggests, “Their goal is to train youth in the skills and procedures they will need in the workplace and at home to live productive lives and perpetuate the func- tioning of society” (Schiro, 5). A teacher’s role is to stay in tune with the needs of society so that students are equipped to perform. This model emphasizes practical focus, hard work, basic skills (i.e. reading, writing, math) toward the end of preparing students for social productivity.
Learner Centered ideology (also known as Progressive, Open Education, Child-centered Education, Constructivism, Whole Child). The goal is that the individual learner develops naturally and discovers their innate nature. Schiro writes, “The goal of education is the growth of individuals, each in harmony with his or her own unique intellectual, social, emotional, and physical attributes” (Schiro, 5). Students are viewed as essentially good in their basic nature and the teacher is a positive and stimulating agent and experience provider. The focus is on individual growth at the student’s own pace, drawing out of the perceived potential that lies within. Schiro again, “It is the job of educators to carefully create those contexts, environments, or units of work, which will stimulate growth in people as they construct meaning (and thus learning and knowledge) for themselves” (Schiro, 6).
Social Reconstruction ideology. Schiro writes, “Social Reconstructionists are conscious of the problems of our society and the injustices done to its members, such as those originating from racial, gender, social, and economic inequalities. They assume that the purpose of education is to facilitate the construction of a new and more just society that offers maximum satisfaction to all of its members” (Schiro, 6). In this ideology, society is basically unhealthy, the survival of marginalized groups is threatened, and action is needed toward a reconstructed vision of society. Teacher and student are encouraged toward education as activism to overcome oppression and injustice and to improve human conditions.
Others have taken up the task of attempting to categorize the various educational ideologies, but I believe Schiro’s analysis is adequate for the task at hand.
A simple glance at these four visions of education should enable one to to better understand the reason for the constant tug-of-war we see in our schools. Schiro writes,
The existence of these competing visions of what good education consists of and the corresponding lack of understanding regarding these visions among educators, curriculum workers, and the general public causes confusion and discomfort among Americans and within American education. (Schiro, 3)
It is also worth noting that many educators and school leaders may actually take a buffet-style approach to using these ideologies. Each ideology has its own inherent strengths from which educators could draw. In addition, teachers are taught by a variety of universities that teach various philosophies.
This results in a significant blurring of the lines in local schools. Public schools (many of which could be categorized as Social Efficiency) might utilize tactics from Learner Centered tactics and even call their methodology Whole Child.
The Classical school I lead, Logos Academy, has a missional emphasis on serving a high percentage of students who live in poverty. We therefore do all we can to make sure our students will graduate as productive members of society (a focus often attributed to Social Efficiency).
Suffice it to say, most of us are not consistent purists with regard to our educational ideologies.
That said, the basic architecture of these four ideological visions undergird our local schools and are often in competition. Schiro summarizes,
The consequence of this in our culture, in which adherents of four curriculum ideologies vie for control over our educational system, is that proponents of each ideology attempt to convert other people to their viewpoint as they assert that their educational perspective is the only proper, natural, and acceptable way of viewing the field. These attempts result in constant pressure on teachers, educators, and members of the general public to accept one ideology and reject the others. It is as though four great magnets tug on all of us who are interested in education, pulling us in four different directions. This has led to an ideological war in the U.S. that is being fought on two fronts: the educational establishment and the minds and spirits of every American concerned with what is happening in our educational system. (Schiro, 9)
With regard to your local school’s educational ideology, you are either an adherent (i.e. a believer), potential convert, or a potential obstructionist enemy.
Once you fully understand your school’s ideology, the one thing you should not be is neutral.
Ideological clarity can help parents make educational choices
Sometimes we don’t even know the reason we are fighting. Anyone who has been in a romantic relationship can attest to it. There are unspoken assumptions, beliefs, habits, a long history, and hardened attitudes that underlie our conflicts.
I am convinced that this is now the case in education. This reality is being most poignantly felt in public schools but is also emerging in private schools as parents press in to understand better.
School boards and school leaders have a role to play in moving us beyond the nasty battles. They can make local district and school ideology clear by publishing and discussing their goals, beliefs, and methods.
These school leaders can help parents understand the ways the local school intends to form children.
School leaders can and should hold their faculty accountable for staying within the bounds of the school’s publicly stated ideology.
Once parents have a clear understanding of their school’s ideology, they can make choices to either encourage, support, cooperate, seek to reform through democratic processes, or withdraw their students.
The American public should resist violence and obstructionism from parents in our local schools.
We can gently remind ourselves that public schools in America are decidedly pluralistic.
But, we should never act surprised that parents want clarity about what their kids are learning at school.
Parents have a God-given duty to raise their children. The local school can be an excellent partner in the formation of their children.
Parents deserve to know the goals of that educational partner.
