Sir, – From my experience, the number of lawnmower parents is negligible in the context of the number of students at third level. In approximately 13 years of lecturing, including some years to classes of over 200 students, I have not once been approached or contacted by a parent to enquire about a student’s performance. In any event, I wouldn’t be able to discuss a student’s performance with a parent since a student’s grades are confidential.
It is very probable that there are parents who are too involved in their child’s college choices and progress. However, we need to be careful that we do not dissuade parents from helping students to navigate the college systems.
It is very common for parents to accompany prospective students to college open days, and this undoubtedly is a good thing. We are asking a lot of our young people to choose between the huge number of courses offered to them by our colleges, sometimes with very little to distinguish them. Parents should be involved in that decision and should ask hard questions of the academics at those open days.
They should go beyond the assertions of academics that their particular programmes offer critical thinking, transferable skills and the opening of minds. It would be impossible to find even one course in the entire third-level sector that would not claim these traits. We have seen in recently published figures on attrition at third-level why it is important that students choose an appropriate course of study for themselves. The more help they can get in doing so, the better, including from “meddlesome” parents.
Each generation faces new challenges and pressures not appreciated by the previous one. Technology advancements make the world of work that our current students face into unrecognisable to the one I, and many of my colleagues, faced when we graduated, in my case 25 years ago. Yet, with some notable exceptions, the way we teach at third level is largely unchanged in that time.
This is also true of the way we assess our students. For example, we continue to use closed-book final exams when we know that our students will never face such a scenario in their workplaces.
We create artificial processes when it suits us, but complain when students do not act as if they were already in a real workplace.
For example, the idea of holding back our notes so that students will be encouraged to sit in front of us to write down our words of wisdom seems to me to be missing the point of a class. The notes are the basis for the work undertaken in class. I would rather my students were not too busy writing, when they should be listening, thinking and questioning. If the notes are enough to suffice for doing well at exams, then students’ behaviour in downloading notes and not attending is a rational response. The problem there is not the students’ actions but the failure to assess understanding rather than memory of the material.
It is important that we do not judge typical students by the standards of those unwilling to work hard for their degrees, or judge parents by those we may find to be overly intrusive. With such a large student population, of course there will be variability in abilities, application and aptitudes. This is surely the case also among the lecturers that stand before our students.
My experience has not been of a “dumbing down” or a general slackening in the quality of the students I see before me each year. Rather I am consistently impressed by the hard work, ingenuity, energy and intelligence of many of the young people I meet in my work. I’d also suggest that the majority of the parents are also doing a more than adequate job. – Yours, etc,
Dr DECLAN JORDAN,
School of Economics,
University College Cork.