Families And Schools: Collaboration And Contradiction In Moral Education

Much of previous research on the relation between families and schools focused on the harmony and collaboration. This paper highlights the other side of the family-school relation: dissonance and contradiction from the empirical- and theoretic research.First, what parents and teachers think of the moral education has been examined by questionnaire and interviews. The result indicates that parents generally approve of the basic content, results, and methods of school moral education; however, there exist some disagreements and conflicts between families and schools in moral education. Similarly, teachers think that parents can cooperate with them in moral education altogether, but parents would cause some troubles for school moral education because of many subjective and objective factors. Therefore, the conclusion is drawn that dissonance and conflict exist between families and schools in moral education.Second, the family-school relation is analysed from the view of sociology. Conflict theoryreveals that the competition for rare resources within a group or among groups results in conflict. In moral education, there are two kinds of rare resources between families and schools梡ower resources and cultural resources. Both schools and families want to influence and control children in accordance with their own value, which may be same or even opposite in some degree. Thus, families and schools have to compete for the power resources in order to exert more influences on children's moral growth. So conflict will take place between them. Role theory shows that authority and expectation are the main factors which lead to conflicts between families and schools. Parents and teachers have different authority in moral education, which is an important educational method, and teach children in different ways. They must try their best to maintain their own authority through gaining children's acceptance of their authority, which is a kind of rare resource. This can bring about conflicts between parents and teachers. Additionally, there are expectations between families and schools which are unanimous or distinct by nature. Due to different expectations, parents would teach children different moral values in different ways from teachers, which can result in dissonance even conflicts in the family-school relation. Besides, parents and teachers have unreasonable expectations on each other, which are impossible to come true. So this would lead to the disappointment and distrust between parents and teachers, which would have a bad impact on the family -school relation.Finally, we explore the true meaning of collaborative partnership between schools and families and find out that this kind of partnership is an unequal, unilateral relationship. The true partnership demands that families and schools should share equal duties and rights, trust each other and schools should play active roles in constructing the partnership.As a conclusion, we think that contradiction exists between families and schools in moral education. Only if we must face the contradiction and seek to survive it, can we build a true collaborative relationship between families and schools. Moral education in these times is too big a job for schools or families to tackle alone. Working together, we have the best chance of helping children become moral people and of creating a good and moral society .