More on Education

Whenever I get sick – I mean fever and everything, not just the sniffles – I tend to think back to what it was like to get a cold when I was younger. When you’re kid and you get sick, you used to look forward to missing school. You got to stay home all day, read your books or comics, play your video games, watch TV… when you’re older, getting sick is just a nuisance that gets in the way of you doing the things you need to do. There’s even a good chance that if you're sick you’ll go to work (despite what they always tell you about not doing that) because you can’t afford to miss the days.

Anyway, all that is to say that today I will continue to talk about education…

Last week I outlined some of the problems I see in the way we tend to look at the education system in the U.S, which I framed as a matter of attention focused on exaggerating some aspects, and underselling others. One aspect that receives some attention, but probably not enough, is the role of the family and the household.

When a kid comes home from school, what happens? First off, for a lot of kids they go home to an empty house or a house devoid of an adult authority figure.

Now, that phrase of “adult authority figure” has a few meanings. It can either mean parent, grandparent, aunt, uncle, parent’s friend, adult neighbor, or even someone like an older sibling or a babysitter with somewhat comparable authority over the child. This is important because many kids go home to either an empty house or only their siblings or friends or an adult who otherwise feels out of place in wielding authority. This doesn’t do much for fostering much attentiveness or dedication to homework or studying as necessary unless those people have a dedication to education that is that strong such that the child feels compelled to do homework or study.

Second is sleep. Again, this is something that gets talked about a lot, but tends to get clouded over in talk about other issues. But sleep is important. It’s not just a matter f not getting up in time for school the next morning, or being tired in class the next day; both of which are indeed problems in of themselves. But there is also the matter of how our brains work.

Our brains do a lot of work when we sleep. It is while we’re asleep that our brains sort out and store the information it has taken in during the day. It’s a bit cliché to say, but it is very similar to the way a PC works, some data constantly written to the hard drive the entire time, but some also stored in the memory before being written to the HDD at shutdown. Lack of sleep is like cutting the power to your PC before the memory can write to the HDD; that unwritten data is lost. Lack of sleep causes its own sets of problems for adults, but adults have already stored most of the knowledge they need to function on a daily basis. For a child who is still learning, that information isn’t there to be called up and used.

These two issues are linked. We hear plenty about the single-parent households, where there is often only a mother who must work to provide a living for the family. It is often the case that there is therefore minimal supervision of the child. A single parent can only do so much to raise a child by themselves with only minimal help from other family or friends.

The problem, however, extends to households with two parents as well. This is because many families struggle to get by on only a single salary. Part of what is overlooked of the interplay between the fiscal health of the average family and its connection to the performance of the children in school is the reality that many families where there are two parents have both parents working. This may provide better financial stability of the household, which can address some of the other issues that come with having economic distress in the home, but it is a problem for the presence of the adult authority figure discussed earlier. The produces a catch-22; both parents must work to financially support the household, but the child doesn’t have the presence of that parent at home after school to support educational goals. What’s more, attempts at providing this support can be effected by other household duties that pile on because of the parents working daily – going through the bills, preparing for work the next day, cleaning the home, preparing meals, etc. with all this to be done, even the most well intentioned parents will find themselves feeling a bit overwhelmed and assuming their child will get along fine.

This is most important at the early stages of education (elementary and likely middle school) when a child is still forming habits. Kids will be kids, until they are no longer kids. That is to say, what kids want to do most is play and have fun. Education is an inherently un-fun process, particularly at such a young age. If not established in the routine of going to school, coming home to do homework and/or studying, getting a proper rest at night, and repeating that process, it becomes easy to flout promises to do such things, be they promises to oneself or to others. Reinforcing this routine helps to preserve that dedication necessary to the educational process.

The challenge that lies ahead, therefore, is how to achieve these outcomes given these sets of circumstances. The most obvious first option is simply have one parent stay at home through the majority of the child’s educational period. That would require that the other parent earn enough money to sustain the entire household, an idea that seems to grow less likely all the time with the way the average household income has been going over the past few decades relative to costs.

But there is an option within that option. As I pointed out earlier in this post, an adult with authority over the child can affect the same outcome given their regard for that outcome is there and they hold sufficient authority with the child. It is tempting for many to place the burden on the teachers, but no teacher can handle that kind of responsibility for 20 to 30 kids, especially when they aren’t at that child’s home every day. When it comes down to it, a child is only going to be inclined so far to take the words of a teacher to heart so much. A teacher is not the parent of every child that walks through their door, no matter how much they may want to try for that child’s sake. That is something that parents must realize, whatever the situation is at home.

However, as I said earlier, a relative, a close neighbor, a family friend, or even an older child, could potentially serve as an adequate substitute for a parent at work in the afternoon when a child is home. If that person acting as guardian sufficiently pushes a child to the routine of coming home, doing their homework and studying, and getting to bed at a proper time each night, the child will have a better chance at educational success.

The trouble here is that not every household has such connections. Friends of parents with a child in school are likely to be parents with their own children in school, and likely facing similar struggles. As a result they may not be in a position to lend such aide. It’s also not always the case that relatives live so close by or are otherwise available to offer such assistance. Older children may or may not be a comfortable fit for doling out a stringent routine the way a parent would, and can only be expected to do so much. And a household that has two parents working may not likely be in the best economic position to hire a babysitter five days a week for an entire school year.

The second option isn’t much more feasible, which is earning more money; don’t we all wish we could magically do this. At the micro level the ideal you could hope for is that one parent essentially gets a job that pays what they were earning plus what the other parent was earning, all without having to take on more hours, so that the second parent could stay home. One would assume, however, if such an idyllic option was reasonable from the get-go then this discussion wouldn’t be necessary in the first place. At the macro level the ideal would be that either costs came down or aggregate wages went up, such that the average single 40-hour a week paycheck could support the average family. However, the trend away from that has been advancing for decades and doesn’t seem to be slowing down, much less reversing, so it’s not exactly a reliable bet.

Nevertheless, if we hope to achieve a better educational system in the United States, these are just some of the inherent problems with our educational institutions, and our societal institutions. I cannot promise that I’ve hit the nail on the head, or even that I’ve gotten too close to charting a solution, but I do believe that these are some of the problems that we must look at.