Actives, not Activists...

There are two kind of parents seen these days. First are those who are not much bothered about the education. They are happy to continue schooling the way it works - exams, marks, punishments, classes etc. They don't have much to say or do about any of this. Once they pay the fees and collect report cards the communication is over. This docile group is probably larger of the two groups. Obviously these parents can't move the school systems to provide better education as they themselves are not vocal about it.

The second group is smaller but more visible. They are the activist-parents, who are not happy with the situation. They question the methodology, motivation, means and ends of teaching. They protests, send legal letters and some time even go to court. At times they question schools only because their child is not happy, fairly or unfairly. Activist-parents cause fair amount of headache to schools. The schools have to make policies to handle such parents - and they apply it to one and all.

Unfortunately, activist-parents also can't move the school system to provide better education -for several reasons. Firstly, schools are stressed even under normal situation. Activists-parents put more stress on them, which no one likes. Schools aren't flexible and nimble to handle criticism. Its difficult to take it positively and integrate into policy changes. Often schools show a knee-jerk response to activist-parents and over react. Lastly, schools are in such a demand that education will always be a suppliers-market. As a result when an activist-parent wins, most often real education is the casualty.

To improve education, what we really need is group of Active-parents and not Activist-parents. Active parents would want to visit schools. Understand what are the top three or four pain-points at the school. They would want to organise volunteer-parents group and support the school in reducing the pressure. School can benefit from a variety of such help - gathering resources, identifying topics which can be taught across subjects or classes, developing skill sets, collating and integrating information needed for each lesson, arranging interesting personalities to visit the schools, teach teachers how to use computers effectively, helping teachers with project material, taking initiative to support educational out-door visits, raising funds for specific needs (such as, sports equipment or audio/video systems). The list could be long. Schools hardly have enough resources, skills, time or money to organize many of these things.

If you notice, this is not something that would ever happen through PTA meetings. What is needed is loosely coupled group of parents who would bring diverse skills and resources to the table. Fortunately, todays technologies allows parents to readily form such volunteer group almost free of cost.

Organizing these things costs little money, considering how much money is already poured into schooling. Yet, these are the very things which improve quality of education. These things change the nature of education much more than worrying about completing curriculum, text-books, exams or fees.

We need - Large number of active-parents around each school.