Introduction and Hierarchy Discussion on Learning Factors

Today in class we were given the list:

• Community
• Curriculum
• Parent
• Student
• Teacher

We were told to order them from most important factor in student learning to least important. Assuming that all of these factors carry a significant amount of importance, I ordered them:

1. Parent
2. Teacher
3. Student
4. Community
5. Curriculum

My justification read:

"The parent(s) are the most important factor. They, by far, have the most exposure and potential influence on a student's attitude and have the greatest opportunity to be an authority figure or lack there of. If a parent allows a student to do whatever they want the student will suffer through the relatively short amount of discipline at school to return to a world of no boundaries in their "real life."

I had trouble deciding whether teacher or student was next on the list as a student will only get out of education as much as they decide to participate, but ultimately I decided that teacher goes first as they have the ability to inspire and encourage a student's enthusiasm.

The community is important for similar reasons as the parents are. Social pressure can either encourage or discourage a student's willfulness to learn.

The curriculum is definitely the least important. Teachers can fail to convey a good curriculum as a teacher can also transcend a poor curriculum."

I stand by most of what I said, although I did realize that parents are often a product of a community, students a product of their parents, and community a product of its youth. We get a sort of chicken-or-the-egg form of circular logic, so my order applies to a micro "snapshot" look at education. It may not apply to a macro look at education.

One student had mentioned that the teacher was number one, stating that he saw a story about a teacher who overcame parents and community by purchasing expensive rewards for students. I'm sure this is an exception, and surely does not take a long enough study of the overall education of these students. I have read many studies where monetary or equivalent rewards only have a positive effect on manual, low-cognition tasks. On tasks that involve intellectual synthesis, these rewards generally have either no effect, or a converse effect.

Another student made the comment that "teacher" is first and parents are towards the bottom, noting that they and their sibling had the same parents, yet one was studious and the other was not. To this, I say that a similar situation existed with my sister and me. She was studious and I was not. But not only did we have the same parents, we also had the same teachers, community and curriculum. By this logic, you would have to place "student" as the number one factor in consideration to "nurture" being a hugely significant factor. I will also say that if there are two siblings with the same parents where one sibling is studious and the other is not, we should consider if the non-studious sibling would be mediocre with involved parents and failing with uninvolved parents.