Parent bashing

The cover story of the Weekender on Saturday, October 8, Teaching Parents a Lesson, was at best a sick joke, at worst a throwback to Dickensian schooling. Either way, it serves to belittle the great gains in recent years as regards parental involvement in education. Stanley Borg seems to be pining for the good old days when the teacher was the lord of all he surveyed, inhabiting the local village Olympus with the doctor, the lawyer, the minor nobleman and the parish priest, receiving the dumb homage of the grateful but clueless commoners.

While Mr Borg's prose trips happily from one trite stereotype to another, what seeps through is a disturbing contempt of working class parents, struggling to bring up their children in an uncertain world they may not recognise, for a future they may not understand.

As a parent and a parent educator, I have seen thousands of parents doing their best with what they have and with what they know. They are thirsty for the knowledge and skills that open up the doors to understanding and participating in their children's and their own learning, knowledge they were previously told was beyond them, a closed book for them.

They feel helpless and frustrated when told that their children are not doing well, that it is somehow their fault, but not what can be done to change this. And I have felt in them the corroding self-contempt that turns the fear and distress of having a failing child into anger, violence and a disowning of the child's educational future.

Not all parents have the cultural knowledge and social skills to behave appropriately with their children's teachers or to make best use of TV.

But they love their kids and given the least opportunity they want to learn and are learning in their thousands through the work of the school councils, the Assocjazzjoni Kunsilli ta' l-Iskejjel (AKS), the PTAs and the Foundation for Educational Services (FES), among others.

Of course, not all biological parents love their children, irrespective of whether they pay for their education or their private lessons. It is a sad fact that such parents are usually the stunted fruit of bad parenting themselves.

While we as a national community do our best to shelter and nurture the children of these damaged and damaging parents, the best solution is to embrace and promote real parental participation in schools. Properly done, this will lead to increased understanding of and respect for both the teacher's role in the classroom and the parent's role at home and at school.

This is the best way to improve children's behaviour and educational attainment and to eradicate the prejudices lurking behind Mr Borg's article.