These days, homeschooling is becoming a more and more popular alternative to traditional learning methods and many
parents
believe that they can do a better job than professional educators. Personally, though, I do not feel that
parents
are the best
teachers
. I feel
this
way for two reasons, which I will explore in the following essay.
First
of all,
parents
are biased when it comes to their own
children
. To be specific, most
parents
think that their
children
are the smartest kids in the world.
As a result
, they often teach them at an inappropriately quick pace and mistakenly assume that they will be able to keep up. Over the course of an entire
school
this
can have serious consequences. An old friend of mine is a compelling example of
this
. Rather than attending his local public
school
, my friend was taught at home by his mother. His mother had good intentions, but she failed completely at teaching him math. She made the assumption that her
son
was able to grasp basic concepts right away and moved on immediately to advanced lessons that were above what he would have been learning at the public
school
. When it came time for my friend to take the annual state-mandated competency tests, he was wholly unprepared and he shocked his mom by earning a failing grade.
This
example demonstrates that
parents
are not always the best
teachers
.
Secondly
,
parents
are not aware of modern teaching methods, and
therefore
use antiquated and ineffective methods to educate their
children
.
Parents
have
children
at increasingly advanced ages nowadays and when it comes time to teach them, they have been out of
school
for ten or twenty years. Professional
teachers
,
in contrast
, have time for professional development every year of their careers and work in a collaborative environment where older
teachers
are kept up to date by their younger colleagues.
This
means that trained
teachers
excel at teaching youngsters of all backgrounds, while
parents
struggle to educate even their own
children
. While my friend’s mother eventually overcame her difficulty teaching math to her
son
, the
next
year she had a lot of trouble motivating him to keep up with his language lessons. She was proactive, though, and sought help from her local
school
board. The officials at the board put her in touch with a young teacher from a nearby elementary
school
. He showed her how to use the Internet to help her
son
find foreign-language resources more suited to his specific interests. Until she got help from that young teacher, she had no idea that the Internet included a wealth of videos, music and games that she could utilize with her
son
.
In conclusion, I strongly disagree with the idea that
parents
are the best
teachers
.
This
is because
parents
are biased when it comes to their kids and because professional
teachers
benefit from modern techniques and training.