The BLOB Usurps Parent Responsibilities

Tunya Audain

 

Parent’s Role And Responsibilities Usurped By The BLOB
 
(BLOB – Bloated Learning Organized Bureaucracies)
 
Instead of “Families First” I say it is “Families Last”.  Even while our BC government says its policies must prioritize what’s best for families, the reality sadly leaves parents left-out in critical matters in child-raising and education.
 
In an essay I claim that while the welfare state continues to grow with more services and more public servants it is the families that suffer.  They are seduced to relinquish their children to early child programs as early as babies.  And, while the children are enrolled in public schools, there is a general “Hands-Off” attitude by the system which discourages meaningful parent involvement. This leaves them “flabby”. 
 
Parents should not be blamed when young people riot as they did recently in Vancouver, BC, and in Britain. Erosion of family strengths by the state has serious consequences on civil society.
 
Families Last  —  The BLOB Is Trump Again In BC Education 
 
(by Tunya Audain 20110815, comment to Report Card blog by Janet Steffenhagen, Vancouver 
Sun Education Reporter on “Conflict 101: Fall studies in B.C. public schools 20110812) 
 
Oh, the cruelty of the welfare state!  The more it says it helps families the more it disempowers 
and disables.  As some of us parents in the 70s used to say  —  “The helping hand has struck 
again!”.  I’m now a grandparent and I’ve seen 40 years of steady erosion of parent effectiveness 
in education to the point that we, consumers, have been rendered practically “brain dead” and 
unresponsive when yet another attack is mounted against the integrity and sovereignty of the 
family by the system  —  the BLOB (Bloated Learning Organized Bureaucracy). 
 
The granting, by the Labour Relations Board, of permission for public school teachers to 
withdraw 30 services deemed to be administrative come this fall during the BCTF “strike” is 
questionable.  One of the articles deals with preparing and distributing report cards to parents and guardians.  In the world of union shakedowns, 30 demands is not unheard of, but I think the 
essential teacher function was deliberately slipped in.  Report cards are an essential teacher 
function, not administrative! 
 
In Canada it is, ultimately, the parents who are responsible for their children’s education. For 
those parents who are unable or unwilling to educate or buy education services  —  and since 
education is compulsory  —  there is the government back-up, social safety-net service of public 
schools. To underscore the importance of an educated citizenry government schools have been 
deemed an “essential service”  —  not to be terminated by employee work stoppages.   
 
Why am I such a voice in the wilderness on this?  Why is no one else protesting, calling “Foul”, 
or asserting that it is totally ILLEGAL to withhold educational achievement report cards from 
parents and guardians? How can a parent monitor progress or advocate for better services or 
withdraw to another school without this information? 
 
I don’t see anyone from the stakeholder groups  —  those who gain their income from this vast, 
bloated system  —  speaking out against this travesty. Even the government subsidized parents’ 
group, BCCPAC, isn’t shaking up the sandbox where all these alphabet soups play in  —  
BCSTA, BCPVP, BCSSA, BCPSEA, etc.  Neither will the teacher training universities speak out 
against the deprivation of this essential parent tool.  How can parents be instrumental in their 
children’s educational progress without this measure? 
 
The “Victory!” of excluding parents from a meaningful role in public schools damages civil 
society.  Thus it becomes easy for even some members of the press to have a lop-sided view of 
how children are raised in our communities.  Today’s opinion piece by Shelly Fralic in the Sun 
amply exhibits this myopic view when she totally blames parents for the riots in Vancouver and 
England.  See today’s Sun “Parents bear responsibility for the recreational rioter” 
 
Fralic flagellates herself and other parents for “bad parenting”.  She quotes the British Prime 
Minister, David Cameron, who sums up the problem  in one word  —  “irresponsibility  . . .  it’s a 
lack of proper parenting, a lack of proper upbringing, a lack of proper ethics, a lack of proper 
morals, that is what we need to change.” 
 
Ms. Fralic  —   please look up classical conditioning.  Two generations of parents have basically 
had their natural instincts disrupted and in many cases extinguished by the “hands off” policies 
and behaviors of the public schools.  Listen when parents talk about “symbolic” use of parents, 
that is, parent advisory councils that are kept busy fund-raising, bullying policies which are 
superficial and unresponsive to parent concerns, incompetent teachers still in the classrooms, etc.
 
Ms. Fralic  —  upbringing is not only what parents do, it also happens in the schools and 
community. Parents have been rendered useless and inept in the public schools. Parents have 
been habituated to being deferential and obsequious to school people.  How would you feel if 
you were treated as a nuisance in your child’s school? 
 
I hate to see parents beaten down and defeated. I deplore seeing the building block of society, the 
family, diminished and crushed. Why is our welfare state so perverted that it serves the interests 
of the bloated producers not the consumers in the monopoly school system?  Parents without 
choice and without a handle on performance are indeed reduced to “absent” or AWOL status. 
 
Professor John E Coons in support of school choice has this to say:  “It's a shame that there are 
no social science studies on the effect of choicelessness on the family. If you are stripped of 
power—kept out of the decision-making loop—you are likely to experience degeneration of your own capacity to be effective, because you have nothing to do. If you don't have any responsibilities, you get flabby. And what we have are flabby families …” 
 
Will anyone please mount a defense for the maligned and excluded parents in light of Fralic’s blind-eye? 
 
Will anyone else share my outrage about the illegal withholding of report cards to parents come the new school year”? 
 
Please see my website for the legal references  :  http://genuine-education-reform-
Please see today’s three letters to the editor, Sun,” BCTF job action rankles readers”