It’s been 18 long years since this author read ‘Why Boys Fail in College’ by H.E. Hawkes. While exploring the avenues of the teaching profession at that time, this writer took every word of the essay to heart and hoped for better results. Little did this teenaged college student, working as a part-time tutor, know that the essay had been around for more than 50 years with no effect at all.
It’s been 18 long years since this humble student has been teaching, training, and mentoring. From primary years to university subjects, from languages and commerce to physical sciences, and from Pakistani boards to O/A Level, the humble learner has worked with more than 8,000 students so far. But it is still a mystery at times why some students fail in studies, or at life for that matter. And the number keeps increasing.
With each advancing year, the will to study, to become learned, literate, educated is diminishing. Academia is becoming less and less interested in education and more and more interested in creating money-making machines. And though we have the undisputed diagnosis if the dean of deans, Mr. Hawkes himself, why is the prognosis not working?
Had Mr. Hawkes missed something? Was it not just the negligence of a few parents regarding the health of their kids or the faulty attitudes of the students that caused deterioration in education? Or has the world changed in the past 80 years and newer problems and challenges have emerged?
Perhaps all answers are correct. Mr. Hawkes missed a few things and the world has come across newer challenges. Newer challenges like the explosion of social media, technology-ism, and woke movements have all challenged the educators.
But isn’t education supposed to start at home? Doesn’t the parents’ role impact the course of a child’s education? And what about the educator’s motivations? Hawkes was brilliant in encompassing the faults in our stars, the transcending flaws in our youth. But he did turn his eye away from the role the parents and the teachers play in a child’s think-ability and outlook on the world.
The author has spent almost two decades experiencing and exploring the importance of the parents’ role in the education of their kids and has made a number of observations on why students still fail in college. In fact, most of the time, it is not the students who fail, but the teachers and the parents who fail to educate the children.
A vast majority of the parents measure the quality of the school by the result that their child produces. And since the schools have become businesses, producing a good, shiny, and starry report card is imperative. The management and the overly underpaid teachers are in agreement that they have to facilitate the child through any means necessary, including help during the exams, to get a perfect score. Such situations train the students to work less on their understanding and more on their grades. If a new and unrounded teacher is invigilating the exam, such students resort to unfair means. And when they actually have to work, they lack the ethic or the stamina to do anything in college or real life at all.
In all the scores of PTMs (parent-teacher meetings) that the author has hosted, parents are least bothered about the child’s character or improvement arc. The readers might anticipate that the majority of the parents are only concerned about the results, as if calculating a return on their investment, and in fact, they usually are interested in their ‘return on investment’, but that is only their secondary interest in a PTM.
The primary interest of any single or couple of parents after an extensive and overly elaborative discussion from their side is: they are the smartest and the most dedicated parents in the world. And that their child is lucky to have them as parents.
These parents come to the PTMs only to make one point, and one point alone: they are the best parents in the world.
They will always expect the teacher and the management to point out to the student that he or she is lucky to have such awe-inspiring parents. And despite having seen thousands of parents, the host of the PTM must concede to have been surprised and impressed and inspired by the divine intellect and galactic efforts of the parent(s), even if there are none.
While the author is a strong advocate of gratitude from students towards their parents, one cannot expect to gain one outcome while striving for the other. ‘You get what you seek,’ they say.
Parents come to prove to a teacher who spends most of his or her life surrounded by kids that they know more about teaching because they have one kid. They don’t come to understand their child from the professional’s point of view. Mostly, since a parent seeks unconditional and extravagant appreciation of unparalleled intellect and hard work, empty words of appreciation from the teachers and management is what the parent will get.
But if the parent wishes to actually and actively understand the performance of the child, and instead of bragging in front of the kid about how much they sacrifice for the poor thankless soul, if a parent actually listens to what the teacher has to say, the child might show how wonderfully beautiful the young mind is.
The teacher must also stop considering the parent as a customer of the boss. Unless the teachers see the parents as parents of the child, they will only brag about how brilliant and perfect they are, as if being reviewed for a performance-based promotion where the success is on their credit and the hiccups are the student’s fault.
This useless tussle between teachers and parents to prove who knows more and why the child is to blame results in the child being ignored and deprived of self-reflection.
While it is important for us to expect that someday our kids will become magnificent doctors, engineers, pilots, and whatnot. We must not forget what our kids are today: kids, our own kids.
Parents should always meet the teachers to discuss their kids. But they should not expect the meeting to end in an announcement: “And the best parents award goes to…”
You might get the award someday, and you might not. But you will definitely lose the child in the process.
