Who’s Taking Care of the Parents?

It is the great fantasy of education that if we can reach children we can change the world. While it is true that when children change the world changes, it is not true that education alone can change children. Not the kind of education we’re dealing with, anyway—public education, national education. Not with our technocratic grasping, reaching for children at younger and younger ages: kindergarten, Pre-K, preschool, daycare. And yet we cherish the hope that our fantasy may yet prove true, that we may yet discover the formula for fixing kids and saving the world. But somewhere between here and prenatal instruction, we will come face to face with the very entities that make our hope a fantasy: the parents. It occurs to me that we have, perhaps, done all we can to catch the kids before their parents mess them up. Perhaps it’s time to deal with the parents.

Many teachers would say that they’ve been saying this very thing for years, though they have done nothing of the sort. What many teachers have done, rather, is complain about the parents of their students and blame them for what teachers cannot handle themselves. Teachers, like everyone else, believe in the holy trinity of education: teacher, student and parent. It is upon these three mighty pillars that we rest all of our work, our talk and our hope. Maybe it’s time to notice that our three mighty pillars are built on the outskirts of town, across the tracks, inches from the gutter. What happens out here is between teachers, students and parents.

Let me be the first teacher to climb down off the platform and take the crowd back downtown. What on earth do teachers have to do with the parents of their students? Even the most involved parents spend much less time around teachers than they do around other adults. Let’s not forget that the parents of our students, by definition, are working with ya’ll all day long. You, the other adults of America, you, who have so generously allowed us to go about our business out here by the tracks, you are directly responsible for the parents of our students. When our students get home, they get home to parents who spent their whole day with you.

Is it fair to blame noncombatants for the mistakes of the parents of our students? Aren’t parents responsible for their own behavior and its effects on their own children? Maybe they are. But are they responsible to come home and tell their kids that what happened today didn’t happen? If they have been disrespected by another adult, is it their responsibility ignore the slight for the sake of their children? Maybe they are. But all this talk of responsibility sounds a long way from talking about how to take care of children. What if, to take care of our children, we had to take care of their parents—man to man, woman to woman, adult to adult? Would we accept that as our new responsibility? Or do we enjoy too much the freedom of not having to care about how other people’s children turn out?

Maybe part of adulthood is not having to care about everyone. It is certainly what makes teachers such odd kinds of adults: we have to care about how everyone turns out, or at least everyone in our class. And after a few years and enough classes, we know that anyone could show up in our class, so we might as well try to figure out how to take care of everyone. It may be a fantasy, but it’s all we’ve got until we get a little help from civilians. Not in the classroom, not as parents of our students. We need a little help from the civilians who are either involved with or avoiding our students’ parents. We could change the world faster if we didn’t have to wait for these kids to grow up.

To paraphrase Andre Benjamin, go and marinate on that for a minute. There’ll be more on this.