THE WORLD OF SCHOOL AT THE BEGINNING OF THE 21ST CENTURY. PEOPLE AND RELATIONSHIPS. CHILDREN AND FAMILIES.
Most students coming to school before World War II had both parents, and children born out of wedlock were rare in ordinary schools. Most parents were also illiterate (at least until World War I). Today, single-parent families are common – in America alone there are almost 14 million of them raising over 21 million children, with far fewer fathers raising children alone as compared to mothers. Children also grow up in same-sex families and with single homosexual parents. There is no reliable data on the impact of these demographic changes on child development yet.
A family in which all three generations survived was quite an exotic rarity until the 1950s due to low life expectancy. But during the 30 to 40 years when some increase in life expectancy coincided with the global economic crisis, the number of such families grew rapidly. It looks like in the 20th century, approximately one to two generations grew up with grandmothers and, less often, grandfathers. We do not know how this influenced the development and maturation of grandchildren, and it looks like by now our chances to find it out are lost. Today, any type of joint family system is far from commonplace, as a result of the emergence of retirement systems. Outside of traditional communities in which joint family settings are historically considered the norm, living with one’s nuclear family alone is ubiquitous. Till the end of the last century, early separation from the parental family into independent life was considered normal in the West. Since the beginning of this century, the age of leaving the parental home has been rising, and today thirty-year-olds still living with their parents, even at their parents' expense, are no longer an exception.
With rare exceptions, all children of school age until the late 1970s were born naturally, with cesarean section becoming a more or less common practice worldwide only from the mid-1960s. Today, one in three children is born through C-section. The first successful attempts at in vitro fertilization were made in the late 1970s. Since then about a million IVF children have been born in America. The procedure is still expensive and succeeds in only 50% of attempts. Of course, there is still no reliable data on the impact of cesarean section, IVF and other reproductive practices on the state of the population.
Family planning entered public life quite recently. From that time fewer children were born, and the first children began to appear much later. The main role in these developments belong, on the one hand, to the spread of contraceptives, the legalization of abortion, and the emergence of methods of reproductive assistance, and on the other hand, to the increase in the duration of education, the general rise in prosperity, and the increase in direct and indirect costs of raising children. There is still no reliable data on the impact of family planning on the state of the child population.
The closed world of the nuclear and, moreover, incomplete family naturally causes a feeling of helplessness in new parents, a fear of making some irreparable mistake, of inadvertently causing the child some irreparable harm. Parents actively seek help, advice and guidance, becoming the main consumers of popular pedagogical and psychological literature, and at the same time victims of aggressive and ruthless medical and educational marketing. By the last quarter of the 20th century, popular child-raising approaches and theories, like many other aspects of our lives, became subject to fashion and marketing, be it Dr. Spock or Dr. Neufeld. If we had data on how children raised by Dr. Spock’s books turned out, we might be able to eventually understand how the Spock generation of children differs from the Neufeld generation. But there is no data, and there will be no results to compare. However, T. Shibutani, a famous social psychologist, thinks that the children of neurotic parents grow up to be neurotic adults regardless of the theory of upbringing their parents consciously adhere to.
Apart from household chores typical of large families at the beginning of the previous century, children had nothing special to do after school. There were no clubs, sections, or any other organized additional extracurricular activities yet. Their playgrounds were the accessible world of fields, forests, rivers, streets, city dumps and ruins – their places of travel, play, fantasy, invention and adventure. Today's obsession with safety was completely foreign to parents at the beginning of the last century, although all these places for children's games and entertainment were full of all kinds of dangers and surprises. Children came up with their own games and made their own toys from whatever materials were at hand – branches, cardboard boxes, rags and threads, pebbles and shards of glass.
There is no doubt that for the vast majority of these children who survived to school age and came to compulsory schooling, school was not only a window into the vast world of knowledge, but also a respite from arduous domestic life and the dangers of street life.
Very few adults could help their school-age children with schoolwork at the beginning of the last century, and the large number of children in the family left parents no time for these concerns anyway. The school could only complain to parents about disobedience and lack of diligence, in which cases a belt or rod was used at home. Five generations later, with universal compulsory secondary education, most parents still cannot (or think that they cannot) teach their children even the three R’s, not to mention anything else. Reminding children to do their homework is what many parents consider their only responsibility in regards to their kids’ education.
Until the late 1960s, most parents unconditionally believed that the school and the teacher were always right, and the children were either convenient for the school or inconvenient. If a student was convenient, it was considered that everything was fine and there was nothing to talk about; if inconvenient, the school's options were few: complain to the family, transfer the child to specialized educational institutions (if available), hold them back a year, sometimes two; expel from school if none of the above worked. The family had nowhere to go with the problem children, and no help could be expected from the school.
The question of how much it costs to raise a child, put them on their feet and release them into adulthood did not occur to anyone a hundred years ago. Today, when a year of an undergraduate program at a university can cost up to half the price of the home a family lives in, only the most naive and shortsighted people can ignore it.
Certain words familiar today not only to virtually every adult, but also to many children - dyslexia, dysgraphia, apraxia, autism, Asperger's syndrome, attention deficit disorder, hyperactivity, hypersensitivity, giftedness/talent, depression, anxiety, panic attacks, burnout - were unknown to parents even in the middle of the last century. This does not mean that none of these conditions existed. It just means that none of them had specific and known labels and, therefore, there were no readily available and reliable diagnostic tools. Most of the time they were not considered to require any special attention or approach other than disciplinary actions. It may seem too late now to discuss the suffering children with these conditions and their families faced when attempts were made to teach them through ordinary means back in the day. But, we need to remember that these children grew to become an integral part of the current parent body. Today, in the USA alone, there are estimated to be over 40 million adult dyslexics, and only 2 million of them have been diagnosed and received timely help.
Early diagnosis of child development problems as well as real help for parents raising such children is still not readily available. Preschool and school teachers are still good at complaining to parents, suggesting that they "talk to their child" or "explain to them" that certain behavior is inappropriate. Pediatricians most often simply wave off developmental and parenting concerns unless those become obvious to an untrained "naked eye" or manifest in full strength. And the teacher has nowhere to go for help when dealing with consequences of congenital alcohol dependence or congenital drug dependence alongside the daily struggles of teaching “typical” students. .
And look where we are now: we take our child to a doctor, a psychologist, or a speech therapist when a problem has arisen and clearly manifested, but we send the child to school for exactly these problems to be created: poor reading, slow reading, failure to complete assignments, self-distraction, distracting other children, not doing homework, etc., etc.
The internet revolution that took place in the first quarter of the 21st century proved to be a way out of the impasse of lonely worries and anxieties for many, if not most, families. Blogs and webinars by popular educators and psychologists are followed and regularly attended by thousands of parents. Local and thematic parenting groups on social media, chats and blogs have become convenient venues for quick exchange of parental experiences, as well as places of mutual support for parents with similar problems. But they are also sources of information of widely varying quality and recommendations of dubious merit on various issues of child development, upbringing and education.
It is exactly these sources that provide the most complete picture of parenting today – its achievements and feats, its difficulties and failures, its daily cares, tossing and turning, anxieties and fears. This is where the monstrous prejudices and lack of common sense are particularly evident, the willingness to "outsource" any difficulty, the belief in the existence of "experts" somewhere on any issue from daydreaming to career guidance, the lack of agreement on the simplest and most common issues...
It is there, on social media and the internet, that parents find themselves a huge target audience for the all-pervasive and ruthless marketing that exploits their difficulties and fears, the most important of which are being late and not giving enough. Being late to potty train and teach arithmetic, not signing up for tennis, ballet, swimming and drawing, falling behind the school curriculum and not hiring a trendy tutor, not finding friends for the child, missing socialization, etc. For every parental fear today, there is a marketized answer: we have developed an accelerated learning method, in five sessions we will teach your child critical, analytical, systems... (insert as needed) thinking.
Another important pillar of marketing is the myth that all parents love their children and want the best for them. Asking a parent to tell a specialist what is remarkable about their child plunges most parents into stupor. But are they ever pleased with their children? Here is a short list: when their children are obedient, when everything comes easily to them, when they are popular in school (class), when they promise to choose their parents' profession, when they read a lot... Any deviation causes annoyance and an irresistible desire to quickly fix the shortcoming.
All of this somehow coexists in parenting with an unshakable confidence in one's own righteousness, a willingness to believe tarot readers, astrologers and self-proclaimed psychologists, and a willingness to first follow the fashion in everything concerning children, and then fight the consequences of this fashion. Parents' appeals to specialists are almost always associated with a request to make their child more convenient, more manageable, like everyone else, or rather, like the best children known to the parent. Amidst this diversity of people, opinions, views and behaviors, children are growing up and will eventually end up in the same class and with the same teacher. What that teacher is going to do with all these children and their backgrounds remains a total mystery for the parents. We’ll talk about teachers, about what they can and cannot do, in more detail below.
A multitude of events and factors came together in the first quarter of our century to change the face of the family, its attitude towards children, and its relationship with children. It is difficult to list them all, let alone single out any one as most important. Children are becoming fewer and fewer, their (excuse me!) "relative value" for the family is higher and higher, and the number of significant adults surrounding them from birth has often been reduced to just the mother. During the life of one generation, the internet has opened instant access to everything previously hidden in textbooks, monographs and libraries; there are already hardly fewer smartphones on the planet today than there are people; parental experience from previous generations is rapidly depreciating, intergenerational ties are being broken and the chains of transmission of parenting skills are being interrupted; children are given gadgets almost simultaneously with pacifiers; mobile apps allow you to monitor a child's movements and activities 24/7. At the same time, concerns about a child's safety on the street, at school, on the internet deprive parents of sleep and peace of mind; 17-18 year olds are talked about as "children'' by the school and parents; and many parents prefer social media and the internet to communicating with their children. Each family has its own quite unique combination of all these as well as other factors that determine the cumulative vector of their children’s development.
Like any living being, a human offspring is directed towards the future: to master, to appropriate the surrounding world, to gain control over one's body, over surrounding things, over one's emotions, over one's relationships with important people, and then with people in general - to become an adult, that is, independent and capable. Some parents get lucky: for them and their children, all this will come easily, either because they themselves are these well-rounded individuals, or because their children got all the right set of genes. Some will be less fortunate, and something or even everything from this list will come to them and their children with significant, or even heroic, efforts. Many examples of outstanding parental efforts and successes have been documented lately and are pretty well known.
This lottery is not fair: someone's long-awaited and desired child may be born with profound autism, while the product of a casual drunk affair may turn out to be a genius. The first will need a lot of help just to enter the world of people and survive in it; the second will have to find adults capable of helping them polish the talent given to them by nature.
When both of them turn, say, thirty, we may be able to somehow explain what exactly made them who they are now. However, what they are yet to become as well as our later explanations of how it happened will largely depend on who we are ourselves.
Some of our children will get lucky, and they will enter the world of love and joyful acceptance, while others will be very unlucky, and they will begin their lives, for example, with a lonely mother in severe postpartum depression. Anyway, the decision to have children and their advent into the world nowadays effectively means that we are signing up for at least 18 years of care and effort. For some of us this contract means providing our children with simply "shelter, food, and clothes"; for others "giving them the very best"; for still others, health concerns will take precedence over anything else. Millions of long term and short term variations of priorities will shape up the developmental vectors for different children. In due course, however, all our children will be brought to school, and it will quickly turn almost every little person with a burning interest in the world and people into a bewildered being, not understanding what is good, what is bad, what they want, or what they are striving for.
At some point, close to the end of the 20th century, well after compulsory secondary education was introduced, the inevitability of going to school finally started to raise doubts among a scattered and small part of parents around the world. It was then that the belief of most parents that "the teacher is always right" was replaced by the radical "parents always know better what their children need," and the lives of school adults changed forever. It was then that the phenomenon of homeschooling (family education) appeared and began to grow quickly. Today it is the fastest growing segment of American education. Before the pandemic the number of homeschoolers was about 4% of the school-age population, during the pandemic it grew to 10%, and once parents had to go back to work it dropped to 6%. In total, today 23% of school-age children do not attend public schools in America.