It is an undeniable fact that parents all over the world, regardless of race, ethnicity, religion, and social class, are concerned with the well-being and progress of their children. No other social concern activates and, at times, even enrages people more than this. Across all cultures and throughout history parents have gone to great and extraordinary lengths to search for what they deem to be optimal or, at least, tolerable situations for their children to grow up and prosper in. American parents are no exception to this rule. In twentieth-century American parental preoccupations with the welfare and advancement of their children have been linked in a singularly close, albeit ambivalent, way to schools as the most decisive instrument for the realization of these expectations and hopes.
For this reason the short shrift given to the role of the family in the most recent commotion over the dismal state of the nation's school is a puzzling omission in the rousing call for the reform of schools, the reaffirmation of excellence, and the restoration of discipline. To be sure, amid the outpouring of reports, books, and articles on the current crisis in American education, one still comes across the customary genuflection before this much abused social institution. Supreme Court pronouncements, presidential speeches, and sundry statements from the non-elite press of the nation are replete with declarations about the primary role of parents in the upbringing of their children. Yet to the powerful axis of educators, policymakers, and pundits of the media--a formidable political-education establishment, by any measure--the affirmation of the family's role in the education of its children is more of an embarrassment than a serious recommendation. Although more conservative groups are straining to revive the role of parents in education, they have little to offer beyond attempts to resurrect a more pragmatic education ideology and to channel negligible tax sums in their direction.
In this case as in others, it seems sufficient for those who dominate the public discourse to pay ritualistic obeisance to a dimly remembered ideal. To the "real" task at hand, however, the family is held to be largely inadequate and irrelevant. The insistence upon the pivotal role of families in the education of their children--a view maintained by a minuscule group of public individuals, in any event--is quickly shunted aside, ridiculed, and conveniently labeled hopelessly reactionary, if not worse. This contradiction between paying lip service to the importance of the family and the continued disregard of its role in education runs through most of the current publications and discussions. The national attention is fixated on forces active in the system of public education. Reform is firmly linked to visible, clearly identifiable educational measures that, it is hoped, will make a difference: curricular reform, length of school periods, teacher competence, and the means to be provided by the government to finance all of this. The customary politicalization of any and all issues of critical importance has served to polarize the discussion of these measures as well. In the public debate the battle lines have been drawn between the education establishment, on the one hand, and a loose, not fully crystallized coalition of more conservative groups, on the other. They are interlocked in constant battles over education ideology, jurisdiction, legislation, and public funding. In such a struggle the family figures only marginally. This may be partly due to dismal experiences in recent attempts to use or, sometimes, to circumvent or replace the family in public policy efforts. It may also be partly due to the intractable nature of the
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