parents help to educate their children: an experiment in chile

Carmen Balmaceda, Joharma Filp, Patricia Gimeno and Howard Richards

P a r e n t s he lp t o e d u c a t e the i r chi ldren: an e x p e r i m e n t in Chi le

The school of Trapiche Alto is situated 600 kilo- metres south of the capital of Chile, Santiago. It is a typical little rural school beside a dirt track lined with poplars. A dog is asleep in the shade, and there are chickens and pigs wandering about. There are children playing at the edge of the track. A little house can be glimpsed in the distance. The school is built of sun-dried bricks; the classrooms are dark, with earthen floors; the benches are arranged in straight rows, and some of them are in a perilous state. The children have finished their day's work and go home. Not long afterwards, the mothers arrive for the meeting. One comes with her little boy, because there was no one at home to leave him with. Then another mother arrives, bringing a message from her neighbour, who will be unable to attend since she has had

Carmen Balmaceda (Chile). Responsible for the production of teaching materials and practical guides for the Parents and Children Project; infant-school teacher.

Johanna Filp (Chile). Responsible for the psychological content and rneasuranent of mother-child interac- tions for the Parents and Children Project; psychologist.

Patricia Gimeno (Chile). Works in production of teaching materials for pre-school children and creative games for the home; teacher at primary and pre-school levels.

Howard Richards (United States of America), educational psychologist and philosopher. Lecturer at Earlham College, Richmond, Indiana, adviser to the Parents and Children Proiect.

to go to the food office to collect the milk for her child. In the space of half an hour, the twenty mothers who attend the course have assembled. They chat, knit and await the arrival of the woman teacher who will open the meeting.

The teacher begins by asking the mothers about the matters dealt with at the previous meeting. The mothers do not answer immedi- ately. There is a certain reluctance to speak in front of a group, but then a bold mother reminds them that they discussed the importance of talking to children at home. That discussion was illustrated with slides. They saw that children learn by imitating, and that they also talk to themselves when playing, because this helps them to succeed better in what they are doing. A few mothers mention further as- pects which they remember.

Next, we see that the mothers have split up into small groups. One mother is blindfolded and takes an object from a bag containing various things brought from home: pebbles, nails, sticks and boxes. The blindfold mother de- scribes the object and the other mothers ask her questions. They are practising a game that they will be able to play with the children at home, so as to help them express themselves and use and recognize new words. There is some sheepish laughter; they feel a little foolish to be playing children's games, but they are curious and painstaking.

Some 2o minutes later, we find the mothers

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Prospects, VoL VII, No. 4, z977

Carmen Balmaceda, Johanna Flip, Patricia Gimeno and Howard Richards

once again in small groups, talking and laughing. One of them is writing and the others are making comments and telling the 'secretary' what she has to write down. They are making up a story to tell their children. Although at first they lacked confidence when faced with this task, in the end each group proudly pro- duces its handiwork. Some mothers have re- told stories which were told to them, and others have remembered poems which the children might learn. For example:

Pin Pin, the Kitten

What is it I feel When I recall

My frolics with little Pin Pin?

People don't know him But I will tell you

He is a kitten, as small as can be.

He has no ears He's going bald

He's lost an eye And he's lost his nose

His tongue is as black As a lump of coal

And his tummy is like a drum.

We are already approaching the end of the meeting. The teacher asks the mothers to comment on their activities. 'We enjoyed them, but we do not know whether we shall have time to play these games with the children. Of course, Rosita goes to school, so she could play with them--she could help them . . . . '

The mothers hand over the children's home- work. The children have drawn the flight-path of a fly. The mothers have also told the children to draw in the sand with a stick. One mother has made a toy from a tin and some pebbles, which her child can use as a musical instrument.

A new pamphlet is given out, containing suggestions on ways in which mothers can help their children and a list of things to do. The teacher reads it out, because there are some mothers who cannot read; later, at home, one

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of the children who goes to school will be able to read it aloud. She also encourages them to invent games. To close the meeting, the teacher asks the mothers to bring their pre-school-age children to the next meeting, because they are going to play with them the games which they have practised today.

Slowly, the mothers depart, some hurrying more than the others, because they must get home to prepare the evening meal for their families, and especially for their husbands, who like to eat as soon as they come home.

As they make their way homeward, they talk animatedly among themselves, while the children run beside them, picking up stones, jumping and chasing one another.

Summary of the project

The Parents and Children Project is sponsored by the Centro de Investigacitn y Desarrollo de la Educaci6n (Centre for Educational Research and Development) (CIDE) in Santiago, Chile, a private, non-profit-making foundation which has connections with the Catholic Church and receives assistance both from various Chilean churches and societies and from international relief agencies, such as Brot fiir die Welt (a German Evangelical agency) and the Ford Foundation (a private United States agency). The Director of CIDE is the Reverend Father Patricio Cariola, a Chilean Jesuit, who, over the years, has become devoted to the quest for educational innovations in Chile and Latin America which will lead to improved social justice and greater opportunities for all.

Parents and Children affects the lives of children of all ages, to the extent that it affects the community's attitudes towards education. However, the project focuses directly on the education of pre-school-age children (aged 4 to 6), toddlers (2-4) and babies.

The Parents and Children Project is based on the following major assumptions:

Parents help to educate their children: an experiment in Chile

This form of education for children and adults is the most economical.

By using this system of teaching, it is possible to achieve more lasting effects, both by mod- ifying values and by improving knowledge in the spheres of education, nutrition and health.

Its extension and expansion to the countryside and/or the town depends on the resources existing in the community, which, given its economic feasibility, enable the programme to cover the most needy sectors.

The principal promoter of educational and social change, within the ambit of the Parents and Children Project, is the rural schoolteacher. Every week, he meets the parents and conducts various activities designed to enlist the participation of the parents and guardians (mainly, in practice, the mothers) in strengthening the effectiveness of those places of learning known as the 'home', the 'school' and the Cneighbour- hood'. At regular intervals, the teachers from the schools taking part in the project hold a meeting, also attended by specialists from the CIDE. These meetings provide them with an opportunity to conduct experiments in group dynamics, discuss the progress of the project and the intentions underlying the teaching materials, circulate audio-visual materials for the work with the mothers and circulate teaching materials to be used by the mothers in their own homes. We have used the term 'circulate' for the audio-visnal and teaching materials, rather than ~distribute', because we see the educational process not as a business trans- action, based on the handing out of knowledge from the specialists to the schoolteachers and from there to the mothers; we see it rather as a network of communications, in which there is give and take between teacher-learners and learner-teachers.

As a small sample of the project, and as an introduction to it, we have just given an account of a typical meeting held in the province of Curic6, where work is currently under way in various parish schools attended by the children

of poor rural dwellers. The project began in I972, and its development has been deter- mined by the conditions prevailing in the country and by the success of the experiments. In the previous paragraph, we referred to the fact that the schoolteachers conduct various activities designed to enlist parents' participation in educational processes. These activities fall into the following five categories: First, motivation of parents. We believe that an

important factor in the success of parents' and guardians' co-operation with the rural school is that they should derive rewarding experiences from it. Some examples of activities in this category are the entertainments put on by the pupils of the school in their parents' honour, and the activities which highlight the knowledge and skills of the parents, such as repairs to school furniture, making black-out curtains for showing sides at school, and planting a kitchen garden for the school.

In the second group come the initiatives of the community itself. For example, during one series of meetings the mothers realized that some children had difficulty in learning to read because there was nobody at home to help them with their spelling. They organ- ized themselves so that a literate person from another family could help every child who had such a problem. On the whole, it may be said that traditional systems of educational planning often spend vast sums on im- plementing ideas put forward at the national or international level, while thousands of ideas of equal or greater merit, albeit on a less grand scale--initiatives taken by rural schoolteachers or rural women--are lost for lack of a sheet of carbon paper, scissors, a stamp or a pair of scales.

In the third category are the actual classes for the mothers, which, as a rule, are also attended by the elder sisters who second their mothers in the household duties. In addition, there is direct work with girls in grades VII and VIII who are the most actively concerned

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Carmen Balmaceda, Johanna Filp, Patricia Gimeno and Howard Richards

with child care in the home. In our introduction to this article we described a typical class, and in what follows we shall give fuller information on this aspect of the project. The subjects for discussion are chosen partly ac- cording to a codification which corresponds to the world view of rural people and the opinions expressed by them and, partly, ac- cording to the opinions and under the re- sponsibility of the teachers and specialists. To be more specific, some of the subjects dealt with so far have been language, nutrition, parents' participation in school out- ings, child development, the kitchen garden, children's preparation for reading, their preparation for mathematics, discipline, human relationships, sex education, mechanical skills, affection in the home and the role of the adult male in the life of the child.

Fourth, activities in the home itself. The mothers come to the meeting accompanied by their children. At the meeting, they work with the teaching materials which are cir- culated. Later, they can take the materials home and engage in learning activities with their own children. The mothers talk about their experiences at the next meeting.

Fifth, activities which arise from the conclusions reached at the meetings would appear to fall into a fifth category. For example, if the mothers consider, in view of the scientific background supplied by the specialists and the teachers, that access to the mass communication media is important for the children's linguistic development, such a conclusion may lead to a campaign to acquire new batteries for radios, since most rural families own a transistor radio, but one whose batteries are fiat.

P a r t i c u l a r s o f a t h e m a t i c u n i t

Let us now take a more leisurely look at the stage reached by one of the thematic units

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which has emerged in the course of the system- atic participation already outlined, in which parents, children, teachers and specialists all have a say. Let us take as our example the work done for the third thematic unit, language.

The unit consists of four meetings. The first, based on slides (or pictures if there is no elec- tricity), should demonstrate the importance for the child of verbal communication, in enabling him m cope with life at home, at school and in the commtmity. It is planned to give rural people access to the findings of scientific research in the field of child development. In this unit as in others, the influence of Jean Piaget and the Geneva school is conspicuous, although use is also made of research carried out at CIDE and other Latin American centres. The second meeting, called a booster meeting, centres on the same subject, tying it in with the everyday lives of the participants, and appraising the suggestions and opinions of the mothers. At this second meeting, the work done by mothers and children at home is commented upon, and creative activities take place. For example, a mother is asked to put her hand into a cloth bag containing various objects (chalk, sticks, pencils, small boxes, etc.) and to try to describe the qualities of the object which she is touching. The following week, she will play similar games with the children at home.

The third meeting of the unit is a workshop, with the children present. Teaching materials produced by the same mothers at earlier meetings will provide a basis for the educational games which will subsequently be played throughout the neighbourhood. The mothers have already made up children's stories, perhaps by recalling tales which they themselves used to hear from their grandmothers, and these subjects now serve as a basis for all kinds of activities which help to stimulate the imagination. At the fourth meeting, the mothers learn simple techniques of appraisal, so as to understand their children better, observing, for example, their ability to perform a manual task in accord-


ance with verbal instructions. Thus they become capable of gearing home education to the needs of each child.

Let us now take a closer look at one of the small 'bricks' or 'cells' on which the proceedings of a meeting are based. We chose the method recommended for working with the sixth of the twenty-three slides shown at the first meeting of the thematic unit on language. This is the meeting briefly described above, which aims at introducing some scientific knowledge into teaching methods based on dialogue. The sixth slide shows on the one hand a parrot, on the other a child. The drill is as follows: The teacher encourages the group to decode

each of the images. In other words, the mean- ings of the pictures are deciphered.

He asks the group to state, on the basis of their knowledge or suppositions, how to teach the parrot to talk, and how to teach the child to talk.

The aim is to identify the differences between the parrot and the child where the use of words is concerned, thereby discovering and drawing attention to the fact that the child is able to think. In addition, he can use the objects which he names.

The teacher makes a synthesis of the group's opinions.

The same procedure is followed for each of the twenty-three transparencies in the lesson, some of them are shown a second time for appraisal, and the lesson concludes with a general evaluation. The lesson with slides sets the trend for the remaining meetings of the unit, as we have already said.

What w e know about parents and guardians

One of the few genuine instincts that can be identified in the human species is the instinct to protect one's offspring. In most cultures this instinct and the tendencies associated with it are developed in such a way that parents love and

care for their children, and are concerned for their children and their children's future. As one mother said: 'We must teach our children, because they do not realize that some day they are going to want to get married.'

We also know that there is a kind of learning, which Albert Bandura has studied under the name of 'social learning' which depends largely on seeing examples of things being done. In order for this type of learning to work the example must be one with which the subject can identify; for this reason the pictures that we use to motivate discussions are pictures of people in situations where the parents can see themselves. There is a certain parallel here with the psycho-social method: in that method the teaching-learner returns to the group its own words; in our method we also return to the group pictures of themselves.

There is abundant evidence for the prop- osition that favourable attitudes and actions by parents are crucial for education. For example, the British Plowden Report found that an index of parental attitude was a better predictor of school success than either family income or parents' education. For another example, this one on the pre-school level, Olim Hess and Shipman have found that assessments of the mother's language style and of the mother's teaching behaviour towards the child are better predictors of the child's abstract reasoning score on a sorting task, than either the mother's or the child's I.Q. score. 1

It is also known that for attitude change to occur there must be some heat as well as some light, that is to say, that information will never accomplish attitude change without interpersonal interaction in which one gives something of oneself, and feels that something important to one is at stake.

z. ]g. G. Olim, R. D. Hess and V. Shipman, 'Relationship Between Mother 's Abstract Language Style and Ab- straction Styles of Urban Pre-school Children'. Paper presented at Mid-West Psychological Association Meet- ings, Chicago, z965.

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On the other hand, there is evidence that the vocabulary of Chilean peasant parents is limited, that children are often hit by their mothers, that there is a high rate of alcoholism among the fathers, that there is little or no reading matter or other cultural resources in the home, and that the males tend to consider child-rearing to be a feminine role.

In short, we know that peasant parents, especially the mothers, are likely to be interested in the subject-matter that we are dealing with, that there are feasible ways to facilitate communication, and that there are problems on which to reflect. We are also quite sure that they know more about those problems than we do, and that our main role is not to tell them how to solve their problems, but to give them support where they need it and ask for it.

W h a t w e k n o w about chi ldren

It is well established that irreparable brain damage is done if the mother suffers from pro- tein deficiencies during pregnancy, or if the child suffers from such deficiendes during its early years. It can also be shown that to some extent it is possible to secure an adequate diet within the limitations of a peasant income, although it is also a matter of urgency to increase the incomes of the poor. The experience of Unicef in Africa and elsewhere shows that one can hope to change eating habits so that a wiser use is made of available resources if one begins by building on the healthy traditions which already exist in a given community.

The work of Piaget tends to show that children learn during their early years through physical interaction with their environment, and through the gradual formation of logical operations through the internalization of patterns of physical interaction. His work under- lines the importance of a rich sensorimotor environment for young children. Other important conclusions to be drawn from Piaget's

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work are that long periods of time are often necessary for a child to develop a given capa- bility for logical thinking, and that children do not simply absorb information from outside, but rather process it through their own thought pattems--thought patterns which are to some extent the same in different children in a given Piagetian stage, but which also vary to some extent from child to child, with respect to how fast a child progresses. The work of Bruner and others tends to reinforce the conclusion that children learn slowly and idiosyncratically.

It follows from these considerations that no school can compensate for an educationally poor environment. Even with maximum school attendance from ages 6 to 14, a child of 14 will have spent less than IO per cent of his waking hours in school, and none of those hours will have been in the crucial first months and years of life. It follows that if children are going to be educated, their homes and neighbourhoods must provide suitable learning environments.

We also know that among the needs of infants are emotional security, and a rich linguistic environment. The work of Chomsky and other linguists and psycho-linguists has shown the intimate connection between syntax acquired in infancy and reasoning capacity. It appears that a child is a device capable of generating quite complex rules of thought/speech, and it also appears that in order to fulfil this potentiality it needs proper exposure to language at the right stage of development. 1

These brief notes on some of the main results of research on the nature of thought and on children lead to the conclusion that children raised under typical peasant conditions are not likely to become participants in the mechaniz- ation of agriculture, no matter how many years

I. The studies made on the subject arc summarized in Gonzalo Gutierrez et al., Educar para el 3,lagtana, Santiago~ Prensa de la Universidad Cat61ica, I974; and in H. Richards, 'El Desarrollo Intelectual del Nifio', Guadernos de Educaddn~Oriemaciones, l~lo. 2I, Santiago, CIDE, I972.


they spend in schoolrooms. But there are also grounds for optimism, for these results suggest that if we can find feasible ways to enrich the child's environment in the right ways, the children of peasants may develop mechanical, verbal and mathematical reasoning powers.

W h a t w e know about social change and about rural schools in Latin America

The results of research on the work of social change agents who attempt to promote technical innovations, indicates that there are general attitudes which constitute receptiveness to innovation. They suggest that innovation in one areauchild-raising in the present case--may be conducive to the formation of modern attitudes that favour a generalized interest in acquiring new skills and techniques, and in rational evaluation. Our own experience suggests that a major component of such a generalized receptiveness to technical innovation is a qualitative change in interpersonal relations, such that the peasant feels neither fear nor shame nor mis- trust in discussing a problem with a person who possesses so-called 'western' or 'modern' knowledge, such as a schoolteacher or an agronomist.

It is a general principle recognized by students of social change that in order to gain acceptance, change must begin within the community, rather than be imposed from outside it. For this reason we do not introduce change agents into the community from outside, but rather support the local schoolteacher, who is already a functioning member of the community, and often one with consider- able prestige. On the other hand, the schoolteacher is often somewhat isolated in the very community where he or she lives and works. One of the functions of the periodic meetings mentioned earlier is to exchange ideas and experiences with respect to breaking down the

barriers that often separate the peasants from the school and the teacher.

Studies of rural schools in Latin America report with discouraging regularity that such schools are not effective by any measure: Teacher morale is low, student achievement is low; few students finish a five- or six-year course, and many who attend for a time relapse later into functional illiteracy. Most schools rely on rote learning, and teach a curriculum that has little relevance to peasant life. Chilean rural schools have been described as 'urban schools located in the country'.

Some commentators judge that improvement of the rural school is either not feasible at all or only feasible at a prohibitive cost. They reason that school will be meaningful to peasants only when it opens the door to economic opportunity, and that schooling should therefore wait until economic development creates a need for more clerks and other school-trained personnel. Ivan Illich has gone farther, and argued that the whole concept of 'school' is pernicious and wasteful.

The pessimists, who hold that rural schooling will not work at all, or that it will only work when economic and social conditions are pro- pitious, have not persuaded any Latin American government to close rural schools. Elemen- tary schooling for everyone has been under- taken as a social commitment, whether or not it is believed that it is a good investment economically.

In this panorama, thus briefly sketched, the Parents and Children Project approach fits in as one which assumes that rural schools are here to stay, and which promises to be an inexpensive and effective way of improving them. We believe that we are improving teacher

I. See, for example, the appropriate section of the series edited by Thomas La Belle, Education and Develop- ment: Latin America and the Caribbean. Los Angeles~ Calif., UCLA Latin American Center, 1972- For a fuller bibliography, see the Resumenes Anallticos en Educa- cidn~ Santiago~ CIDE, I972.

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morale and we give limited support to teachers for their own initiatives.

We hypothesize that an effective way to relate the school to the community is to encourage teachers to work with the parents, and that this process will have positive side-effects in the school itself, even though our principal target is not the school but the home and the community. Our approach is supported by research on in-service training of teachers in the United States, which suggests that in-service training works best where short teacher-workshops are conducted over a long period of time, and where there is a close tie between training sessions and classroom practice. It is also supported by the history of the British infant school movement, which did not begin as a national plan, but rather through initiatives of small groups of teachers, which were systematically encouraged by regional education officers.

Costs and benefits

The evaluation of the project, both in the separate stages of training and in the overall assessment summarizing the results, should enable an analysis of costs and benefits to be made. It will furnish grounds for at least an approxi- mate comparison of these with the costs and benefits of other projects and programmes which seek solutions to similar or related problems. Although onty a mass of incomplete data is available (not included in this report), it may be noted that one of the fullest cost-benefit studies on rural non-formal education, carried out by Unicef in 1974, arrived at the foUowing conclusions, which we find pleasing. 1 The costs of the programmes are always reduced, by and large, when: (a) existing schools are used; (b) the community helps to provide the necessary fa- cilities; (c) the participants make their own materials as an integral part of the educational activities; (d) part-time staff are employed (such as the rural schoolteachers who collaborate with

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us); (e) unpaid volunteers are used (such as the mothers, who devote themselves to their children's education as a central part of their maternal duties); (f) self-teaching materials are used, and the learners help one another with these; (g)learning eventually becomes part of an activity or project with which the local community is constantly concerned (such as child rearing).

The same report specifies one more condition, which the Parents and Children Project does not fulfil, i.e. producing articles for sale, and the data on which the report is based are often no more than analogous, not equivalent, to our own case. Nevertheless, we believe that the experiment conducted in that report shows that our target is economically feasible.

The social and emotional development of children, and the emotional climate of the home and school, are dimensions that should be considered in any comprehensive assessment of the benefits of an educational programme. We consider it to be a merit of the Parents and Children Project approach that it makes an attempt to work constructively in this area.

It is also a merit of the project that it seeks to strengthen the values of family life. Many Latin Americans feel that in the process of industrialization some of the advanced countries have lost traditional values associated with the family, and in seeking to create societies in accord with their values they hope to achieve the benefits of industrialization without this drawback. Given this value, it would be reason- able to say that in a case where identical edu- eational results can be achieved either through the family or through other institutions, then the method which works through the family is to be preferred, just because it tends to strengthen the family as an institution by help- ing it to function more effectively.

I. Unicef, document E/ICEFIL.I3O4, 27 March 1974, p. 164. See also Philip Coombs et al.~ New Paths to Learning for Rural Children and Youth, which is based on the ~ame study.

parents help to educate their children: an experiment in chile

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