Are Parents The Best Teachers? Question the question?

I was asked to answer the following question on the website Quora.com

Is it weird to answer the essay question "Are parents the best teacher?" by explaining that the term "best" is subjective?

My point is that, what is best for you may not be the best for me. So, it is difficult to pick a best teacher "Objectively". Also, since there are billions of parents on this earth,  we can't possibly stereotype all of the parents and answer something. Some parents may possibly be the best teacher while the other are just simply not.

So, I feel that it is stupid to ask "Are parents best teacher?" as the term "best" cannot be quantify like those mathematical values and also we can't give a single answer to represent all the parents in this world.

Pls give your opinion on this question. 

PS: English is not my native language. So, it is highly likely that I have misunderstood the question.

********************************************************************************************************************

The line of people who question the question because of vague terms goes back quite a long way. Perhaps the most famous questioner of all was Socrates. Many of the early dialogues consist of Socrates asking people who thought they knew something what a particular word meant. Perhaps the earliest dialogue, the Euthyphro, has Socrates questioning the person after whom the dialogue is named in order to get him to explain what he really means by piety. I won’t go into any detail, but the dialogue goes on to show that Euthyphro really does not know what piety is. The Republic, his magnum opus, examines in 10 long chapters the meaning fo the word/concept justice,. And my personal favorite, The Symposium, asks many participants to define love.

From a philosophical perspective then, it makes sense to question terms rather than accepting them at face value. To do so means you are moving our mind by critical thinking, a valued skill at colleges and universities, and one not taught nearly enough these days.

I do worry a bit however that you are approaching the question from a less than philosophical view. I am not sure any college would appreciate hearing you think the question is stupid. I am sure you would not say this, but if your tone at all condescends are comes across as dismissive, then I think you will fail to get across that you are an active thinker. Instead, you may be categorized as one who thinks more than he really does and that is not at all what you wish to do.

I don’t think the question is at all stupid. They have asked a very broad question in order opt permit a diverse group of students with different backgrounds to answer it in a variety of ways. If they did not do this then all the answers would sound the same. In other words, if they defined ‘best’ according to some supposedly objective set of metrics, then everyone would end up giving their parents a grade based o these metrics.

The approach you might consider then is to first question and then define what you mean by the term 'best' as it applies to parents. You might do this simply using your own experience at home or you might do this by drawing upon some sources. For example, In his book The Hybrid Tiger, Quanyu Huang talks about the way parents from China incorporate certain cultural norms to instill learning, but the author also sees that what happens in China has problems too and ten advises how Chinese parents and schools can learn from the US. Or you might look at Amy Chua’s The Triple Threat, which tries to define why certain groups (Mormons, immigrants from certain countries and Jews are the ones most highlighted) tend to do better academically than many other groups. Again parenting and cultural norms come into play. 

Or you might think about adapting the approach of Elizabeth Green, whose new book on teaching tries to undermine the stereotypes about what makes a great teacher (a real teacher rather than a parent but the teaching part still might hold true for parents too).

The idea of the natural-born teacher is embedded in thousands of studies conducted over dozens of years. Again and again, researchers have sought to explain great teaching through personality and character traits. The most effective teachers, researchers have guessed, must be more extroverted, agreeable, conscientious, open to new experiences, empathetic, socially adjusted, emotionally sensitive, persevering, humorous, or all of the above. For decades, though, these studies have proved inconclusive. Great teachers can be extroverts or introverts, humorous or serious, flexible or rigid. 

Even those charged with training teachers— the ones who, by definition, should believe teaching can be taught— believe the natural-born-teacher narrative. “I think that there is an innate drive or innate ability for teaching,” the dean of the College of Education at Chicago State University, Sylvia Gist, told me when I met with her in 2009. The consensus seems to be, you either have it or you don’t...."
"But the more I learned about… teaching, the more I saw that what looked like mind reading was in fact the result of extraordinary skill, not inborn talent. Success did not depend on personality; instead, success relied on a body of knowledge and skill that takes years to acquire. Teaching was a complex craft…by misunderstanding how teaching works, we misunderstand what it will take to make it better— ensuring that, far too often, teaching doesn’t work at all".  Green, Elizabeth (2014-08-04). Building a Better Teacher: How Teaching Works (and How to Teach It to Everyone)). W. W. Norton & Company. Kindle Edition.

Is the teaching as a craft approach applicable to parents? Should it be?


Some might say so. Some might also say that parenting is a craft as well, and that this might be a more important craft to learn before trying to learn about the teaching subset.

Or you might try to be a risk-taker and say that genius is not often born but made. Both Beethoven and Mozart had terrible fathers who forced them to learn things almost no one else did at a very early age. Some would call this child abuse. When Amy Chua published her previous book, The Tiger Mom, she was condemned by many for hurting her children yet both became star students but star students with scars. Are the best teaching parents then the best parents? Many might say now and they have some pretty good case studies to show this is so.

To sum up, there are books, articles and lives out there that would all help you to structure an essay on what best means to others and what it might mean to you. This could be a personal narrative or you could adopt a bit more of an academic approach. 
As I said out the outset there are many approaches to the question and starting out with your questioning the question would be fine but then you must choose to take the question as one that isn’t dumb. If you do a lot of thinking about the ways your parents have taught you I think you might find that you have learned quite a bit about yourself and the way you have been shaped into a person that questions questions.

Yesterday, I posted an interview yesterday with a professor who won the top teaching award at his university. He talks about how he teaches and how his students learn and this might give you a few ideas too. 

Best of luck.