Blame Parents Not Teachers

Jakub Balun

English 101

February 20, 2012

Blame Parents

    Millions of students are falling behind in school every year. It is true that as a nation we are faced with important economic issues such as home foreclosures, unemployment, health insurance, and many others. With today’s economic crisis, prioritizing these issues can become a challenge. Even though public education is a high priority, American high school rankings have been continuously falling with comparison to some countries, China and Japan. In order to explain this, there must be something significantly different between the United States and those countries. Hence, before we can attempt to change public education we must come to a firm conclusion regarding the actual cause of this decline. Do we blame the government, the teachers, or the parents when students fail in school? Answering this question might seem difficult but in fact it is quite easy. We can place partial blame on each of them, but the crucial thing is to find the most important one. The most significant and highly overlooked cause of the decline in knowledge among American high school students is not the lack of government aid, or incompetent teachers not doing their job, but the poor and sometimes wrong parenting, as well as the lack of parent’s responsibility for students learning.

The government is often blamed for the lack of financial support when it comes to high schools. The government, whether it is at state or federal level, has always and always will be involved in public education. The idea of public schools stems from the belief of free or affordable education for everyone. In fact it is the role of the government to provide basic funds the public schools need to operate. According to Christopher Chantrill, the founder of a website which provides public government documents, the total combined spending in 2011 on education came to roughly twenty-seven hundred dollars per student. On the other hand, Slovakia...