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A better education system greatly improves the quality of life in society. Improvements in education lead to a reduction in crime, poverty, and many other social ills. Well-educated people can achieve their goals, and live successfully and self-sufficiently. Moreover, well-educated people become productive, contributing members of society. For example, a successful doctor does not just achieve personal success, but he helps society in general by saving lives and making people healthier. In another example, businessmen provide desired products and services to society, in addition to achieving their own personal success.
Unfortunately, the modern education system leaves much to be desired. More than a quarter of U.S. schools are failing under the terms of President Bush's No Child Left Behind law. Many U.S. schools have dropout rates higher than their graduation rates. Many of the students who graduate still have a substandard education that holds them down for the rest of their life.
Generally, school administrators want to improve their schools, but they have too little funding and resources, and too many problem cases.
Incidentally, I would argue that schools could never provide the best education, because there is no one-size-fits-all education solution. However, there are still ways to drastically improve the education system.
I suggest we begin holding parents responsible for their children. We can blame the schools as much as we want, but most children do not fail in most schools. In the very same school, some children fail miserably and misbehave, while other children study, work hard, behave, and succeed. This makes it clear that the parents have failed, not just the school.
The parents and guardians of the children who fail need to be held responsible. We need to create a standard guideline to determine which children are performing so much worse than their peers that it is obvious their parents have failed them. Then, we need to remedy the situation. For example, we could remove every child with a GPA in the bottom 10% from their homes.
DCF or some other authority in charge of children's welfare needs to become involved.
In comparison, we would remove a child from the home if their parents or guardians abuse them. We would hold the parents financially liable for a child who vandalizes property. We need to hold parents to the same standards when their children fail miserably at school.
When a child fails while the vast majority of his classmates do not, then that is sufficient evidence to remove the child from his home. An investigation needs to be done to uncover the very rare circumstances when a child's misbehavior and failure is completely out of the control of the parents or guardians.
The best way to get the worst failing children back on track is probably to send them to boarding school. This will get them away from their home life, and thus stop that environment from causing further damage.
We can force the parents to pay for the children's tuition. Let's do it for the same reason we would make physically abusive parents pay for the abused child's medical bills.
If a child is physically hurt, we make the parents pay the medical bills--whether the child got hurt from the parent's neglect or from general poor parenting. If a child fails at school, let's make the parents pay for boarding school--whether the child failed from the parent's neglect or from general bad parenting.
The point is to make the responsible party pay the bill. I think it is about time we start holding parents responsible for their children. In the case of failing children, we also need to remove the children from their homes, because the parents are obviously too irresponsible to be left responsible for the children.
Nowadays, many parents have decided not to put in the effort it would take to homeschool (or unschool) their children. Instead, the parents send their kids to public schools. The least these parents could do is take care of their children enough that the children can succeed at school.
Scott Hughes owns and manages Unschool.info which is an informative website about unschooling. You can discuss this article and related topics in the Education and Learning Forums. It's completely free, and all viewpoints are welcome. Scott Hughes encourages you to use those forums to post feedback on the suggestions made in this article, as well as to post your own ideas.
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