Will School Alone Produce The Well-Rounded Student?

Is the role of school to concentrate on educating our children about the work environment or day-to-day living? Our children's education is bombarded with more issues every year. Educators are struggling to keep up and parents' frustrations are increasing. It's easy to blame the district, the community or the educators. However, perhaps the concentration should be on what we expect our children to take from their education. We also should be thinking about who should be teaching these lessons.

Do we really expect our school systems to teach our children everything? Today's education system carries the brunt of the job for producing a well-rounded child. When they fail, society and parents and even the children blame the schools. Is this really an effective way to look at what's at the heart of the matter: what part does the role of society, the role of parents, and the role of the child play in a child's education? In addition, where does all this responsibility lie and when should it overlap?

As our population increases, the expectations for school also increase. As culture changes the family structure, society expects schools to teach students more than the basic reading, writing, and arithmetic. Society wants a well-rounded student who can contribute to everyday life and the working world. As a result, curriculum includes so many vast topics that teachers have little time to absorb what is expected of them. If teachers are having this much trouble, imagine the frustration level of the students who have to properly soak up this much information in such little time. You have to stop and ask yourself the value of these expectations. Is the ability of teachers to cover every topic and handle every type of student really going to make the student contribute so much more to society? These are definitely lofty goals for our educators and students. Perhaps these duties should be passed back to others who participate in the child's life.

A child's education goes beyond the classroom and not every lesson in life transfers well into the confines of school. A parent therefore should not expect school to teach everything to his child. For example, love is a concept that can't be taught in school. More often than not, when love is not a part of the child's world outside school, the emphasis on other related topics such as respect and acceptance gets lost at school.

While the student is expected to learn and participate at school, the burdens of today's schooling may overload the student and interfere with proper learning. Teaching techniques may be inadequate to keep pace with rapidly changing technology. Schools are indeed bogged down with too many diverse demands.

We have heard the phrase that it takes a nation to raise a child. But we cannot expect the nation's schools to be the sole responsible party in raising well-rounded children. Schools provide a vital piece of a child's education but children need parents and other teachers from society as a whole in order to become well-rounded members of that society.