Are Parents best Teacher?
Throughout all the years in my life, I was influenced by my parents in many fashions, from the way of thinking to the trifle everyday habits. No doubt, we inherit the gene from our parents and get basic knowledge and norms from them. What we learned from our parents in the early years will be encoded in our mind and be reflected in nearly every aspect of our behaviors. But in terms teaching, I do not think it’s our parents who are the best teachers.
As is known to all, a child will be better trained with a systematic education. However, except those parents who are schoolteachers themselves, few parents grasp the systematic way of teaching. On the one hand, children can only learn a large scope of knowledge step by step from formal education at schools. On the other hand, the parents can only teach their children sporadic knowledge. It is obvious that the young will be better equipped through formal education in classroom.
From the emotional angle, the bond between child and parents are so tight that the parents cannot give a more objective instruction than a schoolteacher can. Some parents tend to spare their children from hard working and, to the extreme, some even spoil their children to do everything they want. All these are resulted from parents’ love toward children. But from an objective angle, hardworking is sometimes a necessary step toward success. Parents should not be blamed for loving their children but such love may become obstacle for objective instruction.
With the coming of the knowledge economic, we may find that our parents’ knowledge is becoming obsolete. In a changing world, the young are always the first to fashion the news ideas and technology. The elderly, however, are always not used to such rapid changes. Thus, conflicts are inevitable between parents and their children. Accordingly, the young are no longer willing to commit to their parents ideas. To catch the tide of such changes, it is of the best interest for the young to learn from the open world instead of from the obsolete knowledge of their parents.
All this is not to say that to learn from parents is useless. In fact, even in the rapidly changing world, the scope of parents’ knowledge still has great influence on their children, especially on young children. But for the young to get the most needed knowledge, they should not solely rely on what they learned from their parents.
