Essay on the Role of Home in Education

Here is your essay on the Role of Home in Education:

1. Personal Interaction:

Home is a primary group, which provides face to face interaction between its members. And no experience is more educative than personal interac­tion of human beings on one another. It is, therefore, that home is the most significant informal agency of education.

2. Provides Complete Social Environment in Childhood:

Infancy and childhood are the most impressionable and a formative period of the child’s life and during these periods, home is the child’s entire social environment.

It is in the home that the child learns to speak, eat, dress and pick up many good habits, imitating the older members of the family. It is in this environment that the child’s whole personality grows and develops.

3. Vocational Education:

It is again the family which provides vocational education to those children who wish to adopt the trade and occupation of their fathers. But girls, in all cases, learn to play the role of housewives by helping their mothers at home and by learning from them. This education and training proves very useful to them in their later life.

Image Source: etf.europa.eu

4. Teachers Social Virtues:

Through participation in social interaction in their family, the child acquires many social virtues such as co-operation, good-will, mutual understanding, self-sacrifice and the like.

In our country, particularly, family is the most important centre of social gatherings through religious ceremonies and social festivals. Children learn a lot of social behaviour on such occasions, as children grow and participate in bigger social units they continue to exhibit the same behaviour pattern as was developed at home.

5. Citizenship Education:

A lot of citizenship education, which is one of the major objectives of any good system of education in a democracy, is also provided at home. Through active participation in household activities, children are trained to shoulder responsibility, understand their rights and obligations and sacrifice their personal comforts and interests for the larger interest of their family. In this way, a good background for citizenship education is prepared in the family.

6. Provides Moral and Religious Education:

Family is the only effective agency for providing education for morality and spirituality to children which is seldom provided in schools. Members of a family generally hold the same religious faith, celebrate the same religious cere­monies and attend the same church or temple.

A good deal of religious education is, thus, imparted to children without making them conscious of it, which is a sure foundation of morality and spirituality at later stage.

7. Develops Proper Attitudes and Interests:

Then providing for the children’s instincts of acquisition and construction through playthings, toys, pictures, newspapers, books, magazines and art craft activities, health interests and attitudes are built up and developed in the family. These also provide ample scope of self-expression to children. All this is a sure foundation of character-building and morality development.

Thus, the importance of family as an effective agency of education cannot be minimised. It is, in fact, the very basis of all social, political, moral, economic, physical, aesthetic and religious interactions in the society. And in spite of the present day disintegration in family life, due to changing sociological circumstances, family is still a great force of education.

However, in the modern complex and complicated social order, it is neither possible nor feasible for the family to impart all the equisite education to the rising generation. Children must be sent to school, which is a formal agency of education set up for the achievement of this specific purpose.

But, even the home should render full co­operation and help to school for bringing about the all-around, harmonious and progressive develop­ment of the child. Home should cooperate with the school authorities with regard to their educational programmers.