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.

In your opinion, why do people attend college or university?

[Note: In the Philippines, college and university are interchangeably used and will be in the same manner here.]

The pursuit of higher education in college and university has a multitude of motivations which can include such trivial things as getting away from stifling parental restrictions. However, there are more common reasons like the prospect of better-paying jobs, family and social expectations, and the genuine pursuit of personal development.

Especially now in this day and age of technical and techonological specialization, the acquisition of a college education has become a prerequisite for landing a high-paying job. Usually, the first hurdle that young people have is whether or not they can claim to have a college education. A mute but eloquent testimony to this is the blank space in the personnel's application form allocated for the name of the university attended. Granted it is possible to achieve technical competence through the trade school route, the college degree holder will nevertheless have the competitive edge when it comes to promotion.

Another common motivation (albeit an extrinsic one) for gaining a college or university education is family and social expectations. In developing countries like the Philippines, society places a premium on a person’s formal education. It is presumed that the child will attend university, whether or not the child wants to pursue a college education.

A third motivation is personal development. Children grow up believing that the completion of their training and education as a person is having a college education. How this might have gotten into their consciousness is not important. What is important is the person consciously seeks to enter college because it is there he or she expects that culmination of intellectual training will occur.

There are a number of reasons for people wanting to gain higher education, but the ones above are the most common.