Home Education : Basic Way of Learning

Jay R. Miranda

As the familiar line says : “Our home is our first school and so, our parents are our first teachers.”

But how and why elementary and high schools graduating functional illiterates? And young people scarcely able to read a newspaper or write an understandable composition?

What is happening in today’s school?

Reforms have been implemented in past years and continue at present, but the fundamental problems remain. And now reformers advocate restoring “good old fashioned” discipline I our schools, hence, the Basic Education Curriculum. They say we must start teaching the basic ones again. Most say that teachers are improperly motivated and need higher wages. Teachers claim that much of the extra – curricular activities that are required of them to accomplish interfere with the time supposed to be spent in teaching their pupils.

In all the possible solutions, one ingredient is missing. Reports almost never mention the vital parental role in education. As former US Secretary of Education Terrel Bell keenly observed, “The decline in part reflects changes in the home”. We have more families with two working parents and larger numbers of single – parent families. Because of the pressures of these families, parents become seldom involved in their children’s education. Only when a child says, “Mom, I just don’t understand….” Do some parents take notice of child’s progress. Really there is general parental apathy especially among parents of children in the public schools. Victor R. Fuchs in his article in a wall Street Journal wrote: “There can be a little doubt that the investments parents make in their children and the value they instill in them are major determinants of how the children will fare in school.”

Parents who are actively involved in their children’s education engender positive results. On the other hand we see a general decline in standards and deteriorating quality of education of young people whose parents do not help in the educational process. Parents send their children off to school beginning at age 5 or 6, then except the government to educate their children. There is a basic flaw with this concept. Education is a process that begins at birth. The first few years set the foundation to future performance. Parents, not schools or governments, are fundamentally responsible for the education of their children.

Schools are only one element in the education of children. Infants are taught whether knowingly or not – by their parents from birth. Babies pick up their parents’ attitudes. They either perform a positive function – the missing link – in their children’s education or by neglect set examples they may eventually come to regret. The irony is, this missing ingredient in education crisis. This knowledge is revealed in a book translated into scores of languages. This book called the Holy Bible says:

You shall teach……your children.

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The author is Master Teacher – I at Bacolor Elementary School-Madapdap,

Bacolor North District.