Parents as Primary Influences: The Major Variable in Childhood Personality Formation

Parents remain, despite technology and despite excessive amounts of time spent in school or in cyberspace, the primary influence on children. Even in cases in which it seems that parents have little influence, and other factors have greater influence, even in such cases, the parents are the primary influence by virtue of their absence — whether voluntary or not — whether parents abdicate their roles, or have their roles taken from them. The absence of a parent is a powerful thing.

Whether the hand-wringing is about bad behavior or bad grades, author Susan Demas argues that if parents are the primary influence, then they are the primary cause of many problems, but also the primary solution to the problems. Concerning low academic achievement, she writes:

As a mom, I say blame the parents. That’s bad politics, as they won’t like you very much and won’t vote for you.

When seeking solutions for underperformance, “it comes down to the” simple “principle of personal responsibility.” Parents can teach responsibility by modeling it themselves, by explaining it to their children, and by expecting it from their children.

As exhausting as parenthood is, it doesn’t mean that you get to cede responsibility to teachers and administrators when your kids are school-aged.

Parents needn’t be experts at school curricula. Simply expecting, from a very young age, that their children get up and out of bed early in the morning, help to straighten up the house, do some cleaning or other chores, clear the table after a meal, etc., all work to develop a sense of responsibility in a child.

In most cases, low academic achievement are not caused by an inability to learn. Rather, low-performing students often lack work habits, organizational skills, self-management practices, and time-management routines.

Numerous studies link achievement to domestic variables during the first five to ten years of life: an orderly environment, regular predictable schedules, adults who model punctuality and hard work, etc.

Kids are only in school seven hours a day. What goes on for the remaining 17 hours is critical. And if children are playing video games and eating junk food nonstop, or living in far worse circumstances of abuse, starvation and neglect - you can bet that will have a big impact on how they’re doing in the classroom.

Core aspects of a child’s personality — aspects which she or he will carry throughout life — are set at very young ages, and are set primarily by parents, even if parents aren’t aware of the process. If a child doesn’t respond promptly to directions given by an adult, if a child hasn’t learned appropriate tone of voice, facial expressions, body language, and communication patterns for a conversation with an authority figure, be that person a parent or a teacher, then the root of these failures will be found in the home, with the parents.

Parents can powerfully model habits like getting up every morning at the same time and leaving for work at the same time, and especially doing it when they don’t feel like it: perseverance and self-discipline.

Parents can model continuing in routine duties even after enduring one of life’s painful shocks: resiliency.

I just thoroughly pummeled parents because they’re purposefully left out of our educational debate. But to be clear, they’re not the only reason American students are lagging behind those in other countries.

To be sure, parents are not the only influence on children. Society, media, schools, etc., also affect children, for good or for ill. A school which fails to deliver solid content, media which overstimulate via sight and sound, and a society which models overly-emotional responses to cultural tensions do not help children.

Making the Most of Your Campus Visit

Traditionally, high school students might visit universities during the second half of their junior year, during the first half of their senior year, or during the summer in between. Visiting a campus can be a useful experience, helping students make a decision about where they will study.

Or it can be a waste of time.

To make a campus visit as productive as possible, a student should first answer a series of questions:

Are you comfortable being an outsider, when most of the people around you have different beliefs and opinions than you?
Are you comfortable being an insider, when most of the people around you have beliefs and opinions similar to yours?
Are you comfortable being anonymous, in a large crowd of thousands, when nobody knows you?
Are you comfortable being in a small group, when most of the people around you know you?
How important is it to you to have the best possible knowledge of the topics that you’re studying?
How important is it to you to have other people think highly of you?
How important is it to you to earn lots of money some day?
Why are you going to a college or university?

That last question is central. Students go to institutions of higher education for a variety of reasons: some go to prepare for a career; others are simply interested in being well-educated. Some go to have social experiences with friends; others go to find a future spouse and eventually get married. Some are interested in earning lots of money; others are looking for a future which is personally fulfilling.

After answering these questions, the second part of getting ready for a campus visit is to write some questions to ask. A student on a campus visit should be asking lots of questions.

In addition, a student can ask questions before and after a campus visit.

Students should look at the university’s or college’s website — or read the printed literature which inevitably arrives in the mail. Looking at those things will help students think of questions to ask.

If a student doesn’t answer some questions before a campus visit, and if a student doesn’t write some questions before a campus visit, then the trip might simply be a waste of time.

Every college or university can show lots of impressive buildings, offer a sample of excellent cafeteria food, and talk about its exciting athletic teams.

Every college or university will introduce several of its students, who will tell you about all the excellent experiences that they’re having on campus.

And because every college or university can do this, visiting a series of campuses will leave a student with the impression that they’re all the same.

Or, even worse, a student might choose one school over another because the people on that campus seemed fun, exciting, or interesting. But those people were a tiny skewed sample of a large student body, and give no real indication of what the average students on that campus really are.

The bottom line: a campus visit can be a productive and useful experience, but only if the visiting high school student has prepared for the visit.

College: What It Is, What It Was, and What It Should Be

In a pluralistic society, like that of the United States over the last century or so, the purpose of education is everything except self-evident. At the elementary, primary, and secondary levels, this ambiguity has not entirely prevented meaningful education from taking place.

But at the post-secondary level, this lack of clarity about education’s function, for the individual or for society as a whole, can be a significant obstacle to intellectual development.

Consider the case of one college graduate who briefly captured the attention of the national media. She had obtained a degree from Boston University, majoring both in international relations and in economics. When elected to Congress, she deflected questions about these two topics with phrases like “I am not the expert on geopolitics,” and “Middle Eastern politics is not exactly at my kitchen table every night.”

Yet someone who holds degrees in economics and international relations is precisely the type of person who would be conversant with geopolitics. What did that person do for four years on campus? What does it mean, in a university setting, to “major” in an academic discipline, if not to obtain some level of expertise?

To be sure, there are still departments within some universities which have, and pass on to their students, competence in critical thinking and intellectual skills.

But the original mission of a college education was both to provide skills (“know how”) and to master a body of knowledge (“know that”). It seems that, in some cases, the mission has stead become providing some vague and personal social experience, as scholar Tom Nichols writes:

At its best, college should aim to produce graduates with a reasonable background in a subject, a willingness to continue learning for the rest of their lives, and an ability to assume roles as capable citizens. Instead, for many people college has become, in the words of a graduate of a well-known party school in California, “those magical seven years between high school and your first warehouse job.” College is no longer a passage to educated maturity and instead is only a delaying tactic against the onset of adulthood — in some cases, for the faculty as well as for the students.

This change in the university’s mission took place gradually in some cases, suddenly in others, and for a variety of reasons. One factor was the substitution of ‘egalitarianism’ for ‘equal opportunity’ in the ideological statements which shape some college administrations.

While both words are used with a variety of overlapping definitions, the shift described here was part of an attempt to provide everyone with a sort of sameness: the same experiences, the same diplomas, the same social status.

While the notion of equal opportunity was put in place to make sure that everyone had a chance in the educational system, there is also the reality that some aspects of education are inherently competitive. Some students will outperform others.

The goal of people of all cultures, ethnicities, races, nationalities, and income levels competing on an equal footing was replaced by the goal of giving a college experience, and a university diploma, to nearly everyone who wanted it, as scholar Robert Bork writes:

Egalitarianism led Americans gradually to extend education to all youths, which was admirable, but egalitarianism also led to the notion that the education must be pretty much the same for all levels of ability. Those with higher levels of academic talent were no longer pressed to achieve as they once were. Not long ago a newspaper printed an examination that all high school graduates were once expected to be able to pass if they intended to go on to college. The test, if I recall correctly, was given between the turn of the century and World War I. I could not begin to answer most of the questions, nor could most of the educated people I discussed it with.

The vocabulary of higher education was founded on words like ‘rigor, challenge, critical thinking, analysis, synthesis, comprehension’ and others. These words pointed students toward the activity of intellectually wrestling with complex texts and concepts.

The abandonment of that vision of education can be seen, e.g., in economics, where classes centered on equations and graphs are yielding territory to classes focused on policies and partisan proposals and movements.

What is at stake is the life of the mind. Will current and future universities be able to encourage women and men to write, not about social experiences, but at the highest levels of intellectual engagement? Will books to be written in the coming decades, by authors who are currently still university students, be challenging minds in the coming centuries?

When Common Assessments are External Assessments: A Plea for Standardized Final Exams in High School

If two different students are taking the same class from two different teachers, should they face the same final exam at the end of the semester? If one student has Latin IV at 8:00 AM with one teacher, and the other student has Latin IV at 9:00 AM with a different teacher, should they be ready to take the same test at the end of the school year?

If those two students are in the same school? Or if they are in two different schools within the same city?

This is the question at the core of the concept labeled ‘common assessment’ - a concept which is making itself felt at Pioneer High School, Huron High School, and the other schools in the AAPS.

This is not a simple debate. Which forms of testing are appropriate and which are inappropriate? To answer that question, we must first know what we teach, why we teach, and how we teach.

A related debate centers around a notorious phrase: “teaching to the test.” Again, we must not oversimplify: “teaching to test” can be a good practice or a bad practice - it depends largely on the test.

The drive for common assessments is designed to ensure that students are not receiving significantly different curricula while attending courses which bear the same designations. If one school’s Algebra II course is offering material which is offered in another school’s Algebra I course, then the transcripts of the students will mean less, because the course titles become ambiguous.

A good way to approach common assessments would be to use tests written, and in some cases even administered and graded, by someone other than the classroom teacher. The teacher would not see the tests prior to administration, but would have a clear idea of what types of questions would be on the test. That knowledge would inform the teacher’s lesson planning.

In short, common assessment should be external assessment.

The assessment could be written by another teacher in the district, or by a national testing company.

The larger the pool of students covered by a common assessment, the better. Having all the Geometry students in a school take a common assessment, among their several different teachers, is good; having all the Geometry students in the city take the common assessment, better.

If the test is not written by the classroom teacher, and if the classroom teacher is not allowed to see the test prior to its administration, the relationship of the teacher to the students is changed: with an external assessment, the teacher becomes more of a coach, preparing students to face a challenge.

If the teacher writes the assessment, the teacher is not a coach, but rather, the teacher, instead of the assessment, becomes the challenge, at least in the mind of the students.

A school district would be well-served to find providers of assessments, and use them as final exams and other milestone assessments, rather than teacher-generated assessments.

Self-Sabotage in Higher Education: You Can Do Anything at The University Except Learn

American universities might be their own worst enemies. Joshua Spodek analyzes self-defeating habits on twenty-first century campuses. He cites relatively impartial evaluations from Moody’s and S&P. These evaluations consider the financial status of postsecondary institutions, but Spodek notes that “financial issues usually aren’t root problems but point to them.”

He identifies ten self-destructive patterns in American higher education.

First, “the most successful students leave American universities.” While this is certainly debatable, the examples of Elon Musk, Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, and Michael Dell are at least thought-provoking. Why did they leave?

Second, colleges are filled with “expensive, shiny distractions from education.” From gourmet cafeterias to social action groups, postsecondary institutions hope to lure students to their campuses, and keep them there for four or more years, with everything except intellectual competence.

Third, misallocation of resources: universities preside over millions and even billions of dollars, but “significant amounts” are “going to non-teaching administrators.” Bureaucrats find endless ways to spend educational dollars, but education itself is sometimes a small fraction of the budget. By comparison, in other nations, universities spend their funds on activities which are more directly related to academic work. Our universities face global competition: in other nations, universities allot their funds primarily toward their core mission of education, and less toward the other pet projects which many American universities favor.

Fourth, colleges are “blaming politics and politicians.” Universities have significant control over their actions and are not the victims of political trends.

Fifth, colleges have been “ignoring domestic competition.” Various institutions have arisen in recent decades which offer direct competition to traditional colleges and universities. A number of software companies offer certifications; the learning which earns these certificates doesn’t take place on a college campus and isn’t associated with a university. An increasing number of online schools, community colleges, and other forms of postsecondary education, including for-profit models, are providing types of education which traditional universities either couldn’t provide, or couldn’t provide at a reasonable price.

Sixth, Joshua Spodek notes that American universities are “delivering 20th century value” in the 21st century. Instead of curiosity-driven intellectual inquiry, the bureaucracy of the higher-education complex (not only the colleges and universities, but the state and federal officialdom which interfaces with them) foster an ossification which doesn’t nimbly redesign itself in a high-tech world which requires precisely such morphing: “Government funding since World War II degraded universities’ purpose of knowledge, scholarship, and reason in favor of professors’ self-serving pursuits of creating centers and and institutes.”

Seventh, the phrase “well-rounded” has been used so often that its meaning has been forgotten. Instead of the university’s athletic department being a small number of elite athletes, sealed off from the vast majority of students, postsecondary institutions could foster physical fitness for the broad majority of its campus: exercise opportunities and recreational sports. Spodek suggests: “Let's separate individual athletic activity from big athletic programs.” The same is true of the arts: encourage large-scale participation by amateurs instead of highly competitive programs for a microscopic number of would-be professional artists. Why? “Sports and art involve performance, which involves motivation, emotions, and other people - how we learn the social and emotional skills that adulthood and citizenship demand.”

Eighth, Spodek calls for a dialogue between academic learning on the one side, and practical, vocational, job-oriented learning on the other side. These two aspects of education can inform each other, encourage each other, and provide a sort of intellectual cross-pollination which benefits everyone. The have competed for too long. They should now collaborate.

Ninth, Spodek sees the universities as “not heeding history.” Perhaps modern universities are too caught up in short-term social and political trends, and have not paid enough attention “to what students, their families, society, and culture demand of institutions transforming youths into responsible, thoughtful, mature adults and citizens.”

Finally, he sees too much emphasis on generating diplomas, certifications, and credentials. Students quickly learn to do what’s necessary - and nothing more - to get the desired documentation. On the academic side, curiosity is not fostered this way; on the practical side, employers learn that the credentials mean less and less. Indeed, some employers are paying less attention to those diplomas, and more attention to their own testing and interviewing.

To be sure, Joshua Spodek’s article is but one among the thousands of pages of critique directed at the modern university. His is not the only one with some merit, and his is not flawless.

His contribution is that he has characterized the university as self-sabotaging. This insight accurately characterizes a problem. Many postsecondary institutions spend lots of energy on their twin obsessions: entertaining students and engaging in socio-political activism. Both pursuits undermine the university’s ability to be taken seriously.

The university harms itself when it fails to direct students primarily toward challenging the mind and toward wrestling with formidable texts.