View of the school from the family point of view
- As in the case of some other Committees, the initial commission for the Specialised Committee on Society and School was much more ample and included study of the main social partners, outside the school, who have a decisive effect on juvenile education. Due to the great importance of all these and due to restrictions on time and location similar to those experienced by the other Committees, the Committee finally decided to concentrate on relations between Family and School, awareness of their primordial relevance. However, we cannot now omit our conviction as to how convenient it would have been to cover other scopes in turn, especially two that have a special effect on juvenile attitudes: the world of employment and the world of communication. It is obvious that the relation between both areas of schooling is, under the present circumstances, especially meaningful for the purposes of diagnosis. The hopes of employment, or unemployment, on one hand, and the pressure by the social media (television especially), on the other, have a great deal to do with academic performance, with syllabuses and with all the other aspects considered here. The fact that this time we have not been able to undertake study of these relations makes it impossible for us to recognise here that these are extremely important lacunae, which must be filled in as soon as possible. As the setting of obligatory secondary education also has a powerful role in the student's surroundings, it would have been just as appropriate to study its main forms, as well as those related to the rural setting (that has deserved so much attention in implementation of ESO), the urban and suburban setting, etc. We hope that the INCE will be able to provide research diagnosis in all these fields.
- The response by Spanish families to the survey prepared by the relevant Specialised Committee was undoubtably a surprise, due to the considerable number of questionnaires indeed filled in and returned, something that was not very frequent in previous research of this nature. Apart from other considerations, this suggests from the offset that the interest Spanish families show in their children's schooling is not fictitious or transitory, but real and increasing. This fact is especially appropriate as, by administering a questionnaire that is mainly self-assessment, there is the risk of interpreting the optimising trend in the answers as a bias. In other words, if the number of answers amounted, as in previous experiences, to about a third, one would consider that these were from the third of the families who are really interested, and that the remaining two thirds had no interest and that the majority were critical. As exactly the reverse happened (the responses reach, and even exceed two thirds), the bias that may be left over for such an item is minimal; even if the silent third is that of uninterested and/or critical parents, it seems clear that the responses we have provide a correct image of what the majority think.
- The first thing the study shows is the considerable improvement in living conditions and standards experienced by Spanish families. However much imagination is put into the answers, one may not doubt that effectively, half of them have a computer at home (although an old or not very powerful one), and the great majority of them may have their adolescent son or daughter in a room of their own (in fact the families still have an average of 2-3 children). There is more room for subjectivity in such answers as, for example, the number of reading and reference books at home (most say they have more than 100). All this is especially notable if one considers that, at present the majority of the parents answering the survey (59% of mothers, 51% of fathers), did not study beyond primary education. In any case, the distribution of living standards is not the same throughout Spain: as to the computer, for example in Catalonia two thirds of the families say they have one, while in the Canaries or Galicia, a third or scarcely more say they have one (which suggests that this is not very determining either, at least at present, as to academic performance). In other factors, as was expected, families who send their children to schools in the private sector declare they have more resources (computer, rooms, books, etc.) than those who send them to state ones. In any case and, to sum up, it seems that families nowadays are able to provide their children fairly comfortable circumstances under which to study.
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