Quote Originally Posted by Ozme52 View Post
Perhaps... but my parents continued my education year round. Perhaps not formal classes, but I was expected to continue reading and learning (things that directly interested me) and took me places... and didn't just let me run around... I was taken to and educated within museums and such.

Perhaps the problem lies with the fact that our schools are expected by parents to be the sole arbiters and distributors of education.

Not enough parenting is done by parents.
If you place more of the onus on the parents however, you create a lot more problems in society. People from poor families either with a single parent who works, or with two parents working full time are much less successful at managing this burden.

Furthermore, blaming the parents for the failures of the school system ensures it continues to fail. It's not like the parents of kids doing poorly in school are going to be more successful as time progresses. Most of the kids who don't do well in school come from families that didn't do well in school, and saying that they should have the supports at home propagates this.

Ultimately the reason we have an education system at all is that parents are not the best qualified people to teach their children a lot of subjects, and if we want the chance of children able to do more and better than their parents did we need a system that enables students to learn skills their parents don't have. Ultimately relying on parents to do more in education fails at this.