Some parents need educating before we reach their kids

e-mail this story discuss this issue in our forums Guest column • Nell Stewart: Some parents need educating before we reach their kids (06/15/05) • Les Sternberg: South Carolina's children deserve better school buildings (06/14/05) • By Ronald C. Reece : Greenville law firm sets 'healthy' example (06/14/05) • Kent Snyder: Furman Learning in Retirement a lifeline to the aging (06/14/05) • Edwin Leap: Many people have become slaves to pain medicine (06/12/05) More details Nell Stewart was edu´ cated in South Carolina public schools and graduated from Lander University. She is a community volunteer especially in areas involving children, volunteering extensively in our public schools, is vice chairman of the South Carolina School Improvement Council Board of Trustees and serves as a Guardian ad Litem with the Family Court.

The recent move to "Put Parents In Charge" of our children's education clearly illustrates this. It did bring a lot of attention to our public schools, and we need to continue that focus while dealing with the realities responsibly.

Are all professionals employed in our schools qualified and dedicated to the educational opportunities of all our children? No. Most of them are, but they are often put into a box by our current societal norms which prevents their effectively teaching all children.

Are all parents sincerely concerned with and dedicated to having the very best educational system for their children? No. But most of them are, yet they are prevented from making sure the system works by those who are not.

While I do not advocate classes of 35 students, I do know that a qualified, dedicated teacher can teach that many students if all of them are disciplined. No teacher, regardless of the education and dedication, can teach one undisciplined child. When one child, in a classroom of even 15 children, is not disciplined, that student can hamper the learning process for the other 14 students in the room, and seriously diminish the ability of the best teacher to teach — severely altering the educational outcomes.

Parents fit into one of four broad groups:

1. Those who love their children and take responsibility for and find ways to truly be effective parents.

2. Those who love their children but are finding outside influences adversely affecting their children.

3. Those who love their children but have no clue as to how to be an effective parent.

4. Those who have no desire to meet the needs of their children but simply want someone else to take the responsibility for them without interfering with the parent's life.

(To prove this take a look at the numerous cases of parental child abuse and/or neglect, and realize that many incidents never come to public attention.)

Groups No. 3 and 4 need attention from various teaching social agencies and the faith community before we alter the educational process. If these groups do not change, the educational outcomes will not change either. They and their children negatively affect the opportunities for children who are loved and disciplined and are seriously trying to succeed.

Ineffective parents are not relegated to the poor, people of color, any ethnic group or educational level. They are found everywhere, in all walks of life in our society.

Governmental entities, especially, tend to perpetuate the problem by giving some individuals and groups excuses to fail ("they are poor," "they are people of color," "they are not formally educated," etc., so "let's give them money in some program"). Others must search for ways to circumvent their negative influences on our children and society in general. It is time that we stop excusing folks for what may have happened to them in the past (abuse, poverty, lack of proper parenting, speaking another language, etc.) which we, nor they can change. Let's give them a challenge to succeed — and insist they be equipped to do so.

All of us must be responsible for our own actions, and effectively help others to accept their own responsibility. The better action we can take to improve the educational system is to find ways to require or encourage — whichever is appropriate — parents to take responsibility to be adequate parents, to discipline their own children and support discipline in the public schools, to get involved in the schools and really support their children in the educational system.

Yes, it will require teaching of parents, but it will allow us to deal with basic issues negatively affecting our schools before we throw more money around uselessly and detrimentally to other services. Let's deal with basic problems first, rather than raising false hopes and damaging our public educational system by pursuing ineffective changes.

We are making progress, but we all need to be responsibly involved in making our public schools fully what they should be. We must not fail our children!