THE FORGOTTEN PARENT
By ROGER CLARKE
We have all forgotten—we the intellectuals, the reformers, the committee-members, the administrators., the teachers—that compul- sory education involves compulsion. Parents are compelled to send their children to school, all their children from the age of five to fourteen—a longer period of compulsion than that enforced in any other European country. In the vast majority of cases they are compAled to send them to the " Council " school and to one par- ticu at Council school, the nearest. It may be a school in which the teacher is untrained or even incompetent, the conditions in •anitary or even vicious, the equipment inadequate or even dangerous, the discipline repressive or even cruel. No matter ; the parent must send her child on pain of the penalties of the law (her child, because in working-class families it is the mother rather than the father who is concerned with the children's education). For middle and upper- class parents, of course, the wind of compulsion is tempered. They have choice of school, and if they decide not to send their child to school at all their competence to educate him at home is usually recognised. But the working-class parent has no such privileges. If she thinks the influence of the nearest Council school to be bad, her only alternatives are to move house to the vicinity of a better school or to send her childr,..n a long journey every day. The working- class parents are compelled. They must send their children to a school over which they have no direct and no effective indirect control, to be educated on lines with which they disagree and for ends of which they have no comprehension.
This does not mean that the average parent is in revolt against the school system. She is glad to have the child out of the house and off her hands. But she resents both the compulsion and the system, and her resentment shows itself in the attitude of parents as a whole towards teachers as a whole. Everyone who is in contact with the working-class notices the jealousy of teachers' long holidays, of their high pay and of their airs of superiority. Working-class parents are glad for their children to become teachers—it is the quickest way out of the working-class—but they resent and to some extent despise teachers all the same. The root of resentment lies in the fact of compulsion and in the complete divorce between the ideals of the parent and those of the teaching profession.
Parents' resentment of teachers is exactly balanced by teachers' resentment of parents. To the average elementary-school teacher the parents of their pupils are a nuisance and a disgrace: ignorant, selfish, benighted beings with no sense of social values, no ideals, no disinterestedness, anxious only to get. their children a training which will enable them to earn more money. In any gathering of teachers you will hear complaints of parents—their fecklessness, their un- reasonableness, their failure to keep their children clean and punctual. The teachers would like to control the feeding, dressing, hygiene, health and sometimes the religion of the children, as well as their class-teaching. For all the extra work it lays on them, they welcome the provision of school milk, of school uniforms, of school dentistry and of Youth Clubs. The parents would prefer to have the milk delivered to their homes, the clothing-provision made in the form of money to be spent on boots and coats of their own choice, the dentistry put on a panel system which would give them choice of practitioner. Most of them accept what benefits are offered, but they resent them ; and being working-class parents their resentment is inarticulate.
* * * * How is the barrier between parents and teachers to be broken down? The first move should surely come from the teachers. Their superior education and their professional position alike demand that they should make the overtures. They must go out of their way to recognise that it is the parents, not the teachers, who are primarily responsible for the children. They must consult them, collectively as well as individually. In every elementary school there should be a Parents' Conference, meeting, say, one evening a month to discuss the affairs of the school, and holding regular consultations with the authorities, school-managers and teachers. The profession might look on this as a way of educating the parents ; the parents would certainly look on it as a way of educating the profession. Once the barriers were down, the way would be open to educational progress along the lines of true democratic community.
Do I exaggerate the barriers? The class distinction between parents and elementary-school teachers is as sharp as any in our class-ridden society. Though they come from the same homes, the teachers regard themselves as members of a higher class than the parents. In a way they have been taught to regard themselves so. They have been segregated from the mass of the working-class ever since they went to a secondary school, probably at the age of eleven. When they left the secondary school they went to "college," usually to a training college, where everyone was preparing to be a teacher. The training college is the opposite of a university ; universality is absent ; the future teachers meet no students in other faculties, no
research-students, no foreigners, often no member of the opposite sex. When they take up their first appointments they are already accustomed to wearing blinkers which many of them retain for the rest of their lives. If the first move must be towards parents' conferences and parents' councils, the second must be towards the liberalising of teachers' training, perhaps through the transformation of training colleges into departments of universities and technical institutes.
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But there is a third step to be taken, a step which involves not so much organisational change as sheer straight thinking on first principles. The present trend in education is all towards totalitarianism. Reformers want the leaving-age to be raised ; they want compulsory powers first, after which they will begin to think how to use them and towards what end. They would no doubt
ike compulsory school feeding, compulsory school dressing, corn- ulsory school dentistry and diphtheria - immunisation. Already ere is talk of compulsory religious instruction (quite undenomina- ional, quite =dogmatic, of course) and of compulsory inculcation a "sense of social purpose." The totalitarian trend is most bvious in the new Youth Movement which is growing at such a ace, especially in certain rural and semi-rural districts. The idea s to enrol adolescents in clubs. Hundreds of Youth Organisers ominous _title!) have been appointed already. Some authorities look orward frankly to the day when every adolescent will be enrolled a Youth Club. But nobody has decided in what direction the ovement is to move.
The definition of purpose with which most reformers and uthorities would agree is, perhaps, the following: "We shall first are for the physical side. Our second task is the forming of haracter and the implanting of a feeling of responsibility and duty. rough the youth we will shape a new generation ready, if neces- ary, to defend the country in arms. The third task will be to instil nowledge." (The definition is that given by Stang, a Nazi Youth Mister.) Education may be moving towards equality, but liberty s being lost in the process and the totalitarian trend is obvious.
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Working-class parents know all this, and the knowledge lies ehind their resistance to so many contemporary reforms. Give us ilk in our homes, they say ; we know how to use it to the best dvantage of our children. Give us money to feed the children roperly, then you won't need to pull out so many teeth. Give us ecent houses and gardens and a bit more leisure, then you won't eed a Youth Movement to get the adolescents off the street-, omers. Give our men the prospect of good jobs, then we won't ant to take children away from school early so as to get some of heir earnings for house-keeping money. All you are doing with our educational reforms, with your compulsory this and semi- ompulsory that, is to patch up the holes in your rotten social ystem. You treat the symptoms and neglect the disease.
The forgotten parent must be remembered if we are to get any traight thinking on the aims apart from the methods of education. ranted the parent is selfish, granted she is ignorant, granted her ision is as unsocial as that of the lioness-with-cubs ; the fact still mains that there must be a balance between the claim of the arent who thinks of the child as a member of the family and of e educationist who thinks of him ag a member of the State. At resent the scales are weighted on the side of the State. In this hird year of war against Fascism we are laying up for ourselves a otalitarian future in education.
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