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After several decades as a student and teacher in Ghana, Zambia, South Africa, the UK, Switzerland and India, during which I met parents from all walks of life and an enormous diversity of backgrounds, I am amazed by the astonishing similarity of their expectations in the matter of children’s schooling.
What surprises me most is this similarity is consistent across differences of creed, colour, culture and socio-economic background. In fact, I have found that four reasonable and simple expectations sum up what most parents want from a school. Interestingly, these fundamental expectations strike me as characteristic of an environment in which young people are most likely to learn and develop. It is an environment which pioneer psychologist Carl Rogers (1902-1987) described as “a growth promoting climate”. It may interest educators, principals and teachers to learn about these parental expectations, which school managements should respect to create ideal conditions for learning.
Children will be cared for. Since time immemorial, schools have been expected to discharge in loco parentis responsibility, i.e to act as a good parent would. This is an obligation that requires deep teacher commitment to nurture and develop children to their full potential. Nel Noddings, currently the Jacks Professor Emeriti of Child Education at Stanford University, has written extensively on the subject of care in education. She defines caring as “a state of being in relation, characterised by receptivity, relatedness and engrossment”.
According to Prof. Noddings, dialogue is an essential part of caring. Teachers cannot be caring without engaging in meaningful dialogue with students. Parents believe that our care for their children flows from close relationships formed by discussion, exchange, and genuine love of working with young people — not merely from a sense of duty or the cold context of impersonal interaction.
Children will feel supported. It’s not enough for teachers to claim to support their students. The question we need to ask ourselves is, do the young people we work with actually feel they are supported? This is a mistake that educational researchers often make. Detailed instruments are devised to measure the extent to which teachers exhibit supportive behaviour. Although several studies have described classrooms in which teachers claim to support students (and truly believe they do), students themselves don’t feel the same way. Moreover parents expect not just academic, but also emotional support for their children — that at least one adult in the school relates to their child by way of what Carl Rogers described as “unconditional positive regard”. Another psychologist David Myers has defined this expectation as “an attitude of grace, an attitude that values us even knowing our failings”.
Children will experience success. Every responsible parent instinctively knows — and this has been corroborated by research — that experiences of success have a profound effect on the mental well-being of children, especially in terms of reducing anxiety, and paving the way for greater success and self-esteem. Anxiety reduction is important because it is a significant impediment to learning.
Of course, sensible parents don’t expect a school to eradicate failure or contrive experiences of success. That failure is often a precursor of success is a universally acknowledged truth. However, anxiety induced by repeated failure is a destructive dynamic. Therefore schools and teachers must help young people to discover that they have the internal resources to manage adversity, disappointment and failure, and it’s their obligation to draw out and nurture these resources to enable children to maximise their potential. This may require a high degree of differentiation in classrooms and customised education — but that is also no less than what most parents expect. At the heart of Dr. Maria Montessori’s philosophy was the belief that after initial setbacks, experiences of success are the essence of meaningful education, and that is precisely what parents hope will be the outcome of their children’s schooling.
Children will be happy. This may seem too obvious to mention, but it is paramount for even the most critical and overly ambitious parent. Parents who don’t care whether their children succeed academically are undoubtedly a small minority. But there are also very few parents who care only about academic achievement and not the health, happiness and balanced development of their progeny. A group of parents was asked: “If you could wish one thing for your child when she leaves school, what would it be?” Unsurprisingly their responses showed a remarkable degree of consensus, with most wishing they could grant their children “happiness”. Obviously, a predictable truism but amid the frenzy and minutiae of everyday life in school, easily forgotten.
Cared for, supported, successful and happy. This is the formula — and every teacher’s responsibility — to enrich the education experience of children entrusted to our care. If as educators we can endow these benefits upon our wards, we will derive the satisfaction of providing a thoroughly good education and substantially fulfilling the modest expectations of parents.
(Dr. Jonathan Long is principal of the Woodstock School, Mussoorie)