Pandemic aggravated tensions between family and school – 05/28/2023 – Education

Ten years ago, I commented on this Sheet a controversy of the moment, about the installation of camcorders in educational institutions, for families to follow their children’s school routine. I highlighted the complexity of the relationship between families and schools, marked by a mix of roles, tensions and mutual insecurities. I could not, then, imagine how much such characteristics would be intensified in the following years, as a result of various factors; among them, a pandemic with overwhelming consequences in several areas.

School education was one of the most affected areas. With schools closed, learning and socialization processes were interrupted and/or transformed. If the shuffling of roles between family and school was already a trend, remote teaching has intensified it. Cameras now invaded schools and homes, transmitting mutual images. Mothers and fathers felt the need to manage, in their homes, applications, spaces and times for pedagogical work. And amid thousands of deaths, risk of contamination, economic crisis.

This was still, however, the privileged side of the scene.

On the less favored side, what was sharpened was not the imbrication of the family and school spheres, but the distance between them. There were no classes or cameras at home. In some, activities arrived on TV or in print. In others, school did not arrive in any form. In several, domestic violence, hunger, abandonment arrived.

In Brazil, this whole process was faced by a divided society. There was no social consensus regarding central issues, such as the importance of vaccines or the value of human life itself. To the deaths and the ills of the disease came the wounds opened by a scenario of political, social, cultural, religious disputes, often marked by the cultivation of fear and hatred.

All this has reverberated in the family-school relationship, which, in many cases, is even more strained. Reports of aggression and violence in the school environment multiply. The recent attacks on schools in Brazil, having multiple conditions, do not fail to symbolize, tragically, that something is not going well in collective life. The school, as a space where cultures and relationships intersect, becomes a scenario for the manifestation of social suffering.

In the field of learning, worrying gaps are recurrently found. For many children and young people, the fragile bond with school has been further torn apart. Absenteeism and evasion are on the rise: many families are unable to ensure that their children attend school.

Whether within the scope of education systems or within each establishment, collective efforts to overcome the necessary difficulties depend on effective leadership and a climate of cooperation and positivity. But the reorganization movements have been slow, dispersed, uncoordinated. There are too many tests and spreadsheets, there is a lack of clear and mobilizing propositions. Family and school find it difficult to go beyond mutual demands. Teachers feel demanded in multiple directions and watched in different ways, but little valued.

When the closure of schools showed how much they are missing, it was thought that this would result in a better relationship with families, on the return to face-to-face classes. It may be happening in some contexts capable of incorporating positive lessons from the pandemic, such as the use of digital technologies for school-family communication, or greater understanding, by teachers, of the reality of students whose homes they visited to carry out pedagogical activities. However, as a whole, there is a type of social fatigue that affects families and school educators.

It is necessary to institute a new dynamic of valuing the school, education and culture, in which these subjects feel the recognition of how much their diligence and good interaction are essential in the management of our present and in the gestation of our future as a society.