There are a couple efforts I’m involved in, and others I am aware of, to try and make the practice of education in this country more humanistic and more closely aligned with our country’s democratic values. One such effort is currently called “Educating for Human Greatness” (based on a book by the same title by the group’s founder Lynn Stoddard) and is endorsed by a number of progressive educators across the country. Click on the links to see EfHG’s proposal (including bios of key supporters) for transforming our education system and the group’s networking forum on Ning.

If you check out the EfHG proposal you can see that it addresses the need to transform the role of teachers and schools in the educational process but really says nothing about the role of parents in that transformation. Some of the people that were involved in the email discussion around starting the group were concerned that this was an important omission. I have heard this in other educational forums, that you cannot transform education without transforming parents and parenting, since it is the expectations of parents that play a large role in keeping our schools untransformed.

So yes, an interesting question to ponder…

First a little bit more on what colors my point of view (besides looking at these issues from the lens of being a current parent and a former youth.) I grew up in a mostly white, mostly liberal university town, the child of two highly-educated parents connected closely with higher education, and through my mom with Democratic Party and later feminist politics. Now a parent with two grown children, I have evolved a ways in my thinking to a position, particularly on education that seems to be somewhere beyond the classic liberal-conservative spectrum.

My partner Sally and I have come a long way in our own thinking about parenting, education and the role parents need to play in the evolution of society towards a more humanistic approach to education. Wrestling with our son’s issues with school, which eventually led to letting him unschool during his high school years, we have come a long way from our initial position that he just needed to tough his way through school, as it was, because it was for his own good.

So I’m trying to look at this process of educational transformation pragmatically – as a step by step process from where we are now to where we envision we want to be. As I see it, the place for parents in the first step of this educational transformation is to step up and be more active “customers” of the educational options that hopefully emerge based on Lynn’s and other transformational efforts, and in partnership with their kids find an appropriate learning environment for their kids at every point in their kids’ development.

Much of the current decision making by educrats and school based staff (teachers, principals, etc.) is directed at (or at least claims to be directed at) addressing the wishes of parents in regards to their kids’ education. For lack of a better word (and a better paradigm), this puts parents in the role of “customers” of education – as the actual paying customers of private/independent schools or the taxpayers funding public schools. I see parents needing to empower themselves to fully embrace this role and proactively look at what each of their kids need and what educational option or learning path meets those needs.

This may be a big stretch for many parents, since it involves developing the skills of an active citizen in a democratic society – joining organizations with others, asserting our needs to decision makers, using our combined voting power to change decision makers where necessary, etc. – skills that may be latent, moribund or non-existent in some of us parents. Maybe a starting point for many parents will be to be more active consumers or customers of learning environments for our kids, since many of us are more skilled at finding a good deal than electing a good government…*g*. Regardless, I think this effort by parents is rightfully beyond the scope of what Lynn’s “Educating for Human Greatness” effort is all about.

I see Lynn’s effort, which I fully support, focused on educators cleaning up their own house. The current world of schools and the huge education-industrial complex (as John Taylor Gatto frames it) that supports our current system is too often the tail that wags the dog. EfHG is a proposal initially to Congress and President Obama and hopefully to state legislators as well to embrace a new vision of what education should be all about in the 21st Century.

Given the goal of being effective with that audience, the EfHG proposal cannot be too broadly cast outside the box towards transforming the whole of society. What it can hopefully accomplish is to convince those decision makers who fund public education and set the regulatory climate for evaluating schools to change that regulatory environment to allow schools and other learning environments that are consistent with EfHG to be created and pass muster when they are evaluated for continued funding. In such a new environment, educators, parents and other community members, will be encouraged to start new schools, learning centers and other educational options (whether public or private), consistent with the EfHG vision that will exist side by side with existing schools.

This is where parents come in, now provided with more educational options for their kids, and hopefully embracing their role and understanding what their kids need, “vote with their feet” and choose good learning environment for their kids. Parents will need to make their own effort to step up and embrace the effort by educators to upgrade their offerings, per EFHG and other aspects in the movement for educational transformation.

Since we are talking about transforming institutions, one final thought… Wearing my more libertarian-leaning hat (at least when it comes to education), I see parenting as one of the few institutions left in our society that is not regulated, not requiring certification by experts, not standardized and not formally evaluated. Some people might say that’s a bad thing, that a lot of parents are not qualified for their very important job.

But maybe this is a good thing, given the track record of social engineering efforts in other institutions, particularly education (as John Taylor Gatto lays out in his book “The Underground History of American Education”). Give parents a chance to react organically and without strong external direction to the changes that EfHG and other efforts may be able to bring to the educational institutions of our country. This would be a good next step, to see how well parents rise to the challenge, and assess where we need to go from there.