alt Hacker NewsIf your goal is high academic achievement, the only real answer is a stable home life, parent-enforced discipline and high parental expectations (note I said expectations not involvement - highly “involved” parents can be worse than the neglectful ones). That’s it. That’s the big secret. Show me a school full of tired/neglected/hungry/unruly students and I’ll show you a school full of students that are going to be almost impossible to teach effectively. There will be exceptions of course, but kids who aren’t parented properly at home will struggle massively to learn at school.
You can throw all the money, new techniques and technology you want to at the problem. It will not get better without fixing that fundamental issue.
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I agree and I have the evidence needed to back up your claims. Stable home life? checked. Parent-enforced discipline? checked. High parental expectations? checked. Through some involvement though, to some degree: we as parents always show real and positive interest on what our children are doing and learning without really interfering unless they explicitly ask for it, and I believe this helps dearly. I learned by doing, trying at first to get involved too much - proved to be a mistake which he corrected it by himself, jumping from an IT career to chemistry in notime and shortly hitting silver at international chemistry olympics. I never try to interfere anymore but just be there, always ready to talk about it and offer the emotional grounding they so much need. Kids will flourish. My elder is on his way to what seems to be a strong, well built medical career and my 6yr old oh boy, she's ready set.
Parent-modeled discipline is arguably just as important. The strengths and struggles in a young person are quite often some analog of the strengths and struggles of their parents. Dealing with the distractions of life and focus on what is truly valuable is a respectable challenge at any age. The expectations and enforcement can be high, but if that is missing, kids are going to struggle and school is going to feel like pretend.
This should be the top comment.
It makes me _irate_ when the solution is "just throw more money at the problem, that will fix education!"
Like, irrationally mad. It is lazy. It is soulless. It is callous. It is arrogant. It is detached from reality.
"Education will fix the problems in schools!" is circular logic.
My pet theory, and this will bet destroyed here, is that we should have developed birth control for males a loonnngg time ago. Accidental kids that have dad peace out on them usually never get a fair shake at life.
I find it endlessly frustrating that this doesn’t get more prominence - there are studies from the early 20th century showing that the biggest factors in performance were things like housing and food stability, dentistry and glasses, etc. but fixing those problems drags up enough unpleasant societal choices that a lot of people prefer not to talk about it.
My wife is a public school teacher and I’ll never forget the time early on that an administrator tried to say she could deal with a kid who was absent more than half the time by making her classes “more engaging”. That kid reported rarely sleeping more than two nights under the same roof.