Schools, Children, and Parents

How much should the home expect of the school, and how much should the school expect of the home? There is no all-inclusive answer, but there are some things to be said which may indicate the direction in which the answer should be looked for. Admittedly, parents are busy, seemingly busier than they have ever been before, busy to the point where every hour of every day seems to be taken up with something. How much busier we really are than were parents of the past is a question. And what people did with their time before they had so many timesaving conveniences is another puzzling question. It would almost seem that the more timesavers we have, the less of time we have. That, however, is another subject. But part of the price of all this pressure is that parents often allow other obligations to take precedence over their responsibility to children. Schools can help with many of the problems of parents⎯and are doing so⎯some schools better than others, some teachers better than others, some communities better than others. But children are a trust from God who gave them, and there isn’t any institution, there isn’t any agency, public or private, that can adequately replace parents. And there are some tasks we should never expect the school to take over. We may be exceedingly busy; we may have many other obligations; we may even have come to think that our children are a public rather than a personal problem. But children are a first priority responsibility with parents. And we may well ask ourselves: What more important use is there for time than talking out something with our children when something needs talking out? How better can we use time than in giving our children the attention they need when they need it, whatever time it takes?