Parental Resistance to Educational Change

The greatest challenges facing parents stem from their own school experiences. Every adult has been educated in some way, and the methods their teachers used usually shape the values they carry with them and color their perceptions of how education “should be.” These learned values are very powerful and can be seen in the ongoing controversies that manifest in social media regarding the Common Core State Standards and math instruction, for example. The notion that there is a critical-thinking process embedded in the way the brain “does” subtraction (and that this method can be taught in a way that will help students transfer that skill) is lost on those who learned subtraction as a simple operation. The learned values that previous generations bring to the discussion often exacerbate an already ingrained resistance to systemic change. I say this not to criticize but simply to acknowledge a reality. Many parents base their assessment of their children’s education on their own education (which always took place decades ago). Because we live in a time of complex and ongoing social and cultural change, the natural anxiety that parents feel for their kids as they grow up is only amplified by these changes.

Jonathan Cassie, Level Up Your Classroom: The Quest to Gamify Your Lessons and Engage Your Students (2016)

• change
• education