Back to basics

Jana Mathia, Gazette Editor | Apr 16, 20200

One of the positives to come out of the current crisis is that people are realizing what the most important things are. When you only have resources for the top priorities, those priorities have to be more clearly defined.

As the model for schooling has drastically changed, the curriculum has been stripped bare, reminding us of the true purpose of schools and what their function is meant to be. Parents have been thrust to the front-line of eduction for their children. While it has been a shock, it is a good reminder that the parents and home really are the primary learning environment and all others are the village the parents allow to support them in raising the child.

Over the years much of the education that should have been taught by parents at home has shifted to the schools to the point we have forgotten what the schools’ priorities are. Until recent events.

One elementary school district, when faced with how to conduct distance learning for its rural population, determined it would focus on the three basics: reading, writing and arithmetic (or math for the newer crowd).

But remember just before COVID-19 struck and the state was in an uproar about new proposed sex education curriculum? Why was that a subject being taught when the schools' primary objective is reading, writing and math?

For years we have been surrendering control of children's learning over to the system. Schools are criticized for graduating students that didn't know basic skills. Adulting 101 classes were instituted to teach how to clean, fold clothes, cook and balance a checkbook.

Could this be a greater insult to parenting? The thought that your adult children were so ill-prepared for the real world that they have to take a class in it should have been insulting.

But it wasn't, because all that education had been pushed off onto the school. Schools are the ones blamed for the lack of real world eduction when all these things the schools "neglected" to teach were being done at home. Instead of using the home as a teaching environment and including children in the chores, parents who dared institute such things were berated for child labor and not letting kids be kids.

So we're stuck in this juxtaposition where kids who were never taught "adult" skills are struggling when they leave home because the school didn't do a good enough job of assuming the role of parent.

Ironically, some of those best prepared to face these adult realities are those who weren't afforded loving parental guidance and learned through the school of hard knocks or a few loving individuals.

If we don't want schools teaching things that conflict with our own morals and ethics at home, then we need to step up as the front-line educators. Parents need to own the tough side of parenting and teach children the things they need to be good adults.

Now that schools have identified what the priorities for public education are, parents and citizens need to remember to take responsibility for teaching our youth the other subjects at home, in clubs, youth groups, churches and based on a foundation of love for the children and their future.

Jana Mathia

Gazette Editor