Parents must do their job so teachers can do their own

By abdicating our parental roles, we are playing a part in kids’ declining educational outcomes.

Striking teachers could have added a new demand. That parents take more responsibility for their children so that teachers can spend more time being teachers. Picture: John Grainger

These words should be chiselled into stone at the entrance of every school: scholarum non parentes. Schools are no substitute for parents. That statement is rarely made.

Yet, through the years, politicians of all persuasions, from across the skill spectrum, have picked up, chewed over and tossed around every conceivable piece of the education puzzle to try to explain declining educational outcomes in Australian schools.

Classrooms are too big. The curriculum is too busy. Principals are not empowered to run a school. Teachers are too ideological. Teachers are underpaid. Teachers need performance pay. Climate change has no place in a maths lesson. Gender fluidity is wrecking our schools. History has been overtaken by Marxists.

A former acting education minister in the Morrison government blamed “dud teachers” for declining educational outcomes. It is a very good thing he is no longer speaking about schools. There are duds in every profession, most obviously in politics, where the reach of their incompetence doesn’t bear thinking about.

Passions run wide and deep about the causes of declining educational standards. And the numbers don’t lie. The most recent results from the OECD’s Program for International Student Assessment, which gathers data every three years from more than 600,000 students in 79 countries, show declining educational outcomes for Australian students since PISA began in 2000.

Schools in China, Singapore and Macau turn out students who are the top performers in maths, reading and science. Perhaps teachers in these top three countries spend more time on teaching maths, reading and science and less time dealing with the panoply of subjects that might better belong in the parenting category.

People rarely point the finger at themselves. But perhaps, by abdicating our most basic roles as parents, we are playing a part in our kids’ declining educational outcomes.

Another body, the Australian Curriculum, Assessment and Reporting Authority, found that Australian students spend the most hours in the classroom, compared with other OECD countries, and are still scoring lower marks than their international peers.

There are only so many hours in a school day. If an increasing amount of time is directed towards teaching kids how to use a toilet, how to drink from a glass when they are four and then, as they get older, how to consent to sex, how to manage friendships, how to be tolerant and civil, how to regulate their emotions, how to follow rules and fix their own small problems, then basic maths dictates that there is less time to teach reading, science, and maths.

In Britain, a recent report after a year-long inquiry by The Times Education Commission found that children aged four and five were arriving at school using dummies and were unable to say their own name, to drink from a cup or to use a toilet. The report found that while disadvantage might often explain why children were arriving at school unprepared to learn, it was not the sole reason either. And the decline in good parenting is not likely to be a peculiarly British problem.

By the time students reach high school, the skill deficits are different but no less time-consuming and exacting.

Social skills, emotional regulation and problem solving are in decline, and unruly, needy behaviour is on the rise, forcing teachers to play the role of soc­ial worker, psychologist, mediator, police officer, judge. And then find time to teach maths, or reading, or science, or history or geography or art.

One Australian public school teacher tells Inquirer it’s common for students to refuse to enter a classroom if someone they don’t like is in there. “When I was at school (barely 10 years ago), we never wanted a teacher involved in our spats. It would be social death. Now, students tell us everything as soon as an issue arises – not the big things like drugs or sexual assault that you want them to tell an adult about, but about a kid who’s looking at them funny from across the classroom.”

Time spent in the classroom managing social issues means less time teaching.

A few weeks back, Briony Scott, principal of Wenona School, a private school in North Sydney launched an overdue rocket at those who are blind to the challenges of the modern classroom.

Scott deserves to be quoted at length because her comments to a leadership conference capture what teachers face daily yet goes unnoticed as we bicker over curriculums, culture wars and “dud” teachers. “I am not a family counsellor,” said Scott, “but I have sat with children and held their wrists as they were bleeding, patched countless self-harm injuries, and told a child that their mother has died and they’ve just found her body, her father too stunned to say anything but ask, ‘Can you tell her? Please?’ 

“But tell me, again, how to do my job.

“I am not a medical doctor, but I have students who are walking around with defibrillators in case their heart stops, epi pens in case their bodies stop, Ventolin puffers in case their lungs stop …

“I am not a police officer, but I give students advice about where to go when they’ve been assaulted or raped, what to do if someone stalks them online or on the way to the bus stop. I explain over and over that child pornography laws apply to them if they send a naked photo of themselves online … Tell me again, how to do my job.”

Scott was not finished. “I am not an extrovert, but I have dressed up as a sunflower, a skeleton, a scientist, a spider, a pirate, Cruella De Vil and one of the Beatles.

“I have watched teachers go on dunking machines, dress up in outlandish outfits … buy pencils and paper and books and lunches for children in need, organise counselling when friendships go to seed or parents divorce, and dig up spare uniforms when the current ones are marred by bloody noses, period stains, accidents because the toilet was too far away, vomit, or mud from the playground …

“But tell me, again, how to do my job.”

We are immersed in a culture that tells us daily how to look more beautiful, how to feel better, how to have better sex, how to decorate your house, how to pamper our pets, how to work more efficiently, how to exercise, how to eat well. As Scott says, we’re not shy about telling teachers how to do their job either.

How to be a better parent is left to the realm of TV with Supernanny sorting out a dysfunctional family for our laughing entertainment, followed soon after by a decade of Modern Family.

There are niche chroniclers of how parenting has gone wrong. From Lenore Skenazy’s free-range kids movement to Jonathan Haidt and Greg Lukianoff’s The Coddling of the American Mind, the decline of the resilient kid and the consequences of not growing into an autonomous adult able to deal with the risks and vicissitudes of life are being discussed in some quarters.

In Australia, Daisy Turnbull’s 50 Risks to Take with Your Kids is kicking off similarly important discussions in small pockets of society.

If schools are not equipped to parent our kids, then governments aren’t either. But that doesn’t mean we can’t better educate and help parents with information either. Every research project, expert body and think tank that devotes resources to the big question of how to fix our schools would do worse than spend time also exploring what has gone wrong with modern parenting and how to fix it.

On Thursday, Catholic school teachers and public school teachers joined together in a historic move to strike together for better wages and more time to teach. As one teacher told a group of striking teachers in Bathurst, “working conditions for teachers are learning conditions for students”.

If you think a teacher is overpaid, ask yourself why you haven’t joined the profession. Then speak to a teacher. Many of them are often more passionate about wanting more time to be teachers.

Bureaucrats rarely cut administrative burdens that they have imposed on teachers. Instead, they add more layers that serve no useful purpose except to point out that bureaucrats have, again, “done something”.

Striking teachers could have added a new demand. That parents take more responsibility for their children so that teachers can spend more time being teachers.