Every time the university starts its semester, “should parents’ meetings for freshmen students be held?” becomes the focus of public opinion. Opponents believe that the high school management model is spreading to universities when college students are already adults and specially inviting their parents to attend. Supporters believe that increasing communication channels between home and school is normal and there is no need to over-interpret it. Rather than simply debating whether it should be opened or not, it is more worth asking: Where should the boundaries be drawn for collaboration between universities and families?
The emergence of parent-teacher conferences for college freshmen has its realistic background. Judging from the actual operation of student work in colleges and universities, counselors and class teachers face specific matters in students' study and life. Once emergencies arise, parents are often still the important communication targets. At the same time, credit-based course selection, major transfer, exemption from graduate school guarantees, financial aid system, psychological assistance mechanism, etc. are all relatively unfamiliar to students and their families who are new to campus. Appropriate information communication can help reduce misunderstandings and facilitate timely collaborative handling when students have psychological crises or other emergencies. In this regard, it is not entirely necessary to maintain certain channels of communication between the university and the family.
This controversy has emerged in recent years and is also related to changes in college students and their family relationships. After the popularization of higher education, college students face more complex choices such as further education, employment, and postgraduate entrance examinations. Family support at the information, economic and emotional levels is still important. In addition, many family education resources are highly concentrated on their children. Parents' continuous attention to their children's learning and growth is often not immediately interrupted by a college admission notice. At the same time, this generation of freshmen grew up in an environment with very close communication between home and school. Parent groups, performance feedback, and instant messaging have long become daily routines. After entering college, it is difficult for the connection between family and school to suddenly disappear.
Therefore, it may not be accurate to simply label parent-teacher conferences for college freshmen as “high school-oriented”. Behind this criticism is often a presupposition: as soon as college students have reached adulthood, their families should withdraw completely immediately. But adulthood does not mean that a person suddenly has fully mature life abilities and judgment abilities after his 18th birthday. The transition from adolescence to stable adulthood is itself a process of gradual independence. One of the important tasks of university education is to help students form independent judgment and sense of responsibility in this process. If the parent-teacher conference can help parents understand the difference between university education and primary and secondary education, and encourage them to gradually adjust their roles, it will be reasonable.
But concerns about “high schoolization” should not be discounted either. In reality, some college parent groups have evolved into score bulletin boards, and there are even phenomena where parents ask counselors to wake up students and intervene in their daily lives. This type of practice extends the management methods for minors to universities, blurring the boundaries of responsibilities that adult students should bear. Therefore, the crux of the problem is: what exactly does home-school collaboration coordinate and to what extent does it involve?
A valuable parent-teacher meeting for college freshmen should focus on necessary information, adaptation to school, mental health, and handling of emergencies. More importantly, it should help parents understand the characteristics of college education and complete role transformation. The parenting inertia formed over the past decade or so will not disappear in a vacuum, and it is easy for parents to continue to use the management methods used in primary and secondary schools. If the university clearly tells parents at the beginning of enrollment what matters they can pay attention to and which choices should be the responsibility of the students themselves, it will help reduce cross-border interference later.
The core of this role change is from "manager" to "supporter". Home-school communication at the university level cannot be a channel for schools and parents to jointly manage students' daily lives, nor should it be a tool for parents to continuously keep track of their grades, whereabouts, and life details. When it comes to matters such as course selection, grades, living arrangements and even career choices that should be handled independently by adult students, schools should first face the students themselves instead of habitually seeking parental intervention.
What needs to be especially vigilant is that once home-school communication becomes a normalized and detailed management mechanism, new dependence may arise. When students encounter problems, they first wait for the school to contact their parents. Parents are accustomed to using counselors to understand and intervene in their children's lives. Over time, the responsibilities that should originally be borne by students are instead shared or even replaced by schools and families. This is obviously contrary to the goal of university education to cultivate independent personality and sense of responsibility.
Therefore, if the parent-teacher conference for college freshmen is just a necessary exchange of information and to help families understand the rules of college education, it is not a bad idea; if it extends to continuous performance reporting, life supervision, or even parents handling affairs on behalf of students, the boundary has been crossed.
The education goal of universities is, in the final analysis, to enable students to gradually learn to take responsibility for their own choices and lives. Schools and families can certainly provide support, but this support should ultimately point in the same direction: returning the space and responsibility for growth to the students themselves. Whether the parent-teacher conference is reasonable or not should also be used as a criterion.
(The author is a special researcher at the Hunan Normal University Base of the Hunan Provincial Research Center for Theoretical System of Socialism with Chinese Characteristics and deputy dean of the Higher Education Research Institute of Hunan Normal University)
Sun Xionghui Source: China Youth Daily
