Some Say That Parents are the Best Teachers. Do you agree or disagree?

I generally disagree that parents are the best teachers. They can’t be. If parents were the best teachers, then we should expect all parents to have vast knowledge matched with a specialist’s finely-honed grasp of the intricacies of each field of study. Nobody would need to go anywhere else but home for an education. We would be launching spaceships and splitting atoms from our backyards.

The proposition that parents are the best teachers is an aphorism, a wisdom saying, such as “haste makes waste” or “an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.” In this sense, parents ARE the best teachers. The best learned lessons for living are those learned at home, on the knees of our parents so to speak. You never forget lessons like those.

But parents are not the best teachers in all things and at all times. Humans are finite and each one has strengths and weaknesses. Parents can sometimes expect too much from their children yet be totally unaware of the fine art of teaching. They can become terrible taskmasters who end up traumatizing and getting in the way of the child’s developing desire to learn. On the other extreme, parents could be lackadaisical and be unsupportive of a child’s efforts to learn. When it comes to the education of children - that realm of study done at schools - then people other than parents could better as educators.

This is not to say that home-schooling parents are doomed to fail. They are exceptions who have consciously undertaken the formal education of their children. Furthermore, these parent/teachers progress is guided by standardized education modules from the Department of Education and the learning monitored through competency examinations taken by their children. As such, these parents are little different from the teachers found in regular school.

Nevertheless, on the whole, parents are not the best teachers.