Theoriginal intention of the advice is to encourage parents to join the schooleducation of their child. This is beneficial in some extent. For example,someone versed in painting can be a volunteer teacher for the after classschool, which is intended for the hobby of students. School can save a lot ofmoney and students can get a good teacher whose job is just painting, notteaching, which may be a different experience from the normal class. Whenparents get involved in the school education of their children, they have morechances to talk with the teachers, the classmates of their child, and of coursetheir child. This will help the understanding of their child. And also schoolis a different environment from home or Disneyland. The child can see adifferent father or mother, whom they may want to make friends with. So theconclusion is that school volunteering benefit the school and help theunderstanding of parents and child. But thereare three aspects to be considered. Firstly,parents are busy during the work day. The mandatory working time may be 8hours, from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m., but they may live far from the working place, makingthem spend 2 or 3 hours going to work and returning home. So when they are freeat 7 p.m., all students have left school. The timetables of parents and schoolsjust can’t match for the volunteering. Secondly,not all parents are versed in painting or some other skills appropriate for theafter school teaching. What will they do? Cleaning the teaching building, orcutting the grass? The school has some employees to do all the above mentioned jobs.So if the parents just want to volunteer to do the same, the normal order ofthe school may be disturbed, which is just the opposite we want. The circumstancemay be even worse for high schools, where the courses is more familiar to theirchild than themselves, which makes them useless. Thirdly,schools have to spend a lot of time to communicate with parents to settle thevolunteering time and content. When I was in primary school, there were approximately80 students or more in one class. So we got 160 parents waiting for thevolunteering. If we had 40 days a month, 4 parents must be arranged in one day.It is obvious a painstaking job for the school. In sum,the advice may be impractical. As I see it, there are many other ways tocombine the school and the parents. For example, in China, the chattingsoftware QQ, which is very popular, can be used to create a community,consisting of the teachers, the children and their parents, where they can talkabout the problems the children faced with, the advice to the parents orteachers, or some other aspects they concerned with. If parents and schools alltake an active part in the children’s education, children will surely grow uphealthily and happily. |