The Detriments Of Parentocracy: Challenges Faced By Working-Class Children in Schools

‘Parentocracy’ was a term first conceived by Brown in 1990 where the ideals of meritocracy were increasingly eroded by the system of parentocracy. According to him, parentocracy refers to a phenomenon in which parents’ wealth and social capita have a greater bearing on success than the child’s own efforts and abilities. Parentocracy, by any other name, is parental choice, entitlement or power, encouraging them to be more involved in their children’s education. With the rise of the increasingly competitive occupational markets in the wake of economic globalization, growing portions of middle and upper-class families were unwilling to risk their children’s educational careers solely to the uncertainty of open field meritocratic competition.

The most visible and tangible manifestation of parentocracy is the vast amount of money parents spend on tuition and enrichment classes. However, endowed cultural advantages also comes in subtler but equally consequential forms: the language spoken at home or the amount of time parents spend reading to their toddlers.

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Unsurprisingly, the lower-class families face the brunt of the detriments of parentocracy as they are unable to secure a comparative advantage for their children. These differences in family life not only lie in the advantages parents are able to obtain for their children, but also the skills being transmitted to them. With the ubiquity of supplementary classes, many Singaporeans fall into the trap of taking for granted that our educational system is merit-based and there are ample opportunities for every child regardless of their family backgrounds. This fosters the impression that children from low-income families are simply less motivated or lack a conducive home environment for effective studying.

While these perceptions are not wrong per se, they are insufficiently precise – inadvertently attributing the full blame to low-income parents for the weaker academic performances of their children. In this essay, I will be focusing on the disadvantages faced by lower-class children in education institutions as a result of parentocracy.

To begin with, the parenting style of “Concerted Cultivation” is contingent on nurturing a child’s development the strategic optimization of life opportunities through the orchestration of structured, progressive skill-enhancing educational and extra-curricular experiences. Middle to higher income families typically possess a wealth of assets such as: higher education and income levels, greater facility with dominant culture as well as more knowledge on how educational institutions function. Leveraging on their these social, economic and cultural capitals, these parents secure an educational advantage for the children, effectively streamlining the path towards success for their children. Hence, the lives of students from more privileged backgrounds are often organized around a steady set of adult-run organized activities, many even before they have yet to step into primary school. Private supplementary tutoring can be divided into two categories: academic classes and non-academic classes. The former, known locally as ‘tuition’, refers to the provision of extra help for examinable subjects such as science and mathematics.

Non-academic supplementary refers to enrichment programs and activities such as ballet, sports or a learning a musical instrument. A Singaporean survey conducted by the Straits Times in conjunction with research company Nexus Link revealed that seven in ten parents enrolled their children for extra supplementary classes. This reveals the desire and commitment of these parents in boosting their children’s chances of succeeding in school in an exam-oriented society where academic excellence is prized. The popularity of non-academic programs can be attributed to the desire of parents to boost their children’s chances of being admitted into elite schools via ‘Direct School Admission’ (DSA) – which allows students to gain entry into schools by displaying a range of talents and achievements. Notably, the expensive truth behind the costs incurred by Joseph Schooling’s parents to train him into Singapore’s first Olympic Gold Medalist sheds light on the prevalence of parentocracy in Singapore. According to the financial news site Asian Finance, it is a hefty $1.34 million investment. This included sending Schooling to a train at the Bolles School, a swimming powerhouse and absurdly expensive prep school, which amounted to $62,980 a year. Given the hefty cost of these classes, a member of parliament uses the term ‘parentocracy’, claiming that the DSA scheme is propitious to children from more affluent families as they have the means to be nurtured in specific areas from a young age. Given the ubiquity and availability of enrichment tutors and centers, children who are granted these privileges are advantaged in a system that rewards precocity. Hence, children from lower income tend to fall behind and are punished for having insufficient exposure outside of school as compared to their more affluent peers. By the virtue of rewarding precocity, there appears to be an irrational outcome: the majority of these children are labeled “slow” from a young age, despite appearing to be of regular intelligence and not being diagnosed with learning difficulties. From this, it is noteworthy that the main reason for these children’s falling behind can be attributed to their relative class disadvantages. Unsurprisingly, schools also privilege children who have acquired the skills cultivated by middle class “Concerted Cultivation” parenting intervention over those produced by the working class “Accomplishment Approach of Natural Growth”.

Educators, who come from middle-class background themselves, often expect parents to adopt a pattern of “Concerted Cultivation”, where they closely monitor the development of their child’s skills and talents via active parental participation.

Parental involvement, characterized by coherence between home and school and learning communication with teachers, cooperative decision making between parents and teacher and mutual support is also associated with children's success in school. Specifically, if parents and teachers communicate actively regarding their child’s curriculum and homework, parents will be able to keep track of their child’s development. This fosters the creation of consistent academic and behavioral goals that enhances the continuity between school and home, creating an integrated experience for the child.

However, low-income parents often do not actively involve themselves in their children’s academic upbringing due to their lack of cultural capita. Instead, these parents often consign the role of an educator entirely to the school. In Singapore, few working class parents can afford the hefty tuition cost of private tutors or sending their children to Kumon math classes even if they have the inclination. Often coming from a background of low schooling, these parents often converse in dialects or mother tongues. Hence, they face language barriers when communicating with educators who mainly use standard spoken English. This perpetuates the feelings of inadequacy in these parents as they also feel that they have little to offer as compared to the professionals trained to educate their children. Thus, this eventually culminates in a perceived lack of interest on the part of working class families from educators and a gaping hole in the quality of home-school relationship.

Most importantly, many children from lower income families struggle to meet the expectations of being in a Middle-class institution, which eventually takes a toll on their academic performance and schooling experience. Examples of these conventions include the use of “network” English, insistence on punctuality, a tight schedule of moving from lesson to lesson, the expectation that they will stay on task and work without close monitoring, achievement-oriented climate as well as the evaluation of a child in terms of their academic abilities as opposed to who they are as people. For children from more affluent backgrounds, the transition between school and home is practically seamless as they have been accustomed to a life organized around a steady set of adult-run organized activities. Teachers mostly held higher expectations for these children, holding them to stricter standards and more frequently called upon them for answers, promoting greater learning and greater confidence in their own abilities. Among the middle and upper class, the majority of children were perceived as more intelligent and more adjusted to school demands in their earlier years as compared to their peers from working-class families. However, for working-class children, the mismatch between home and school for these children is especially dramatic, who were brought up outside of the Middle-class mainstream. They are forced to adapt and learn to function in an institutional context governed by conventions, as opposed to their home. The lives of these children at home mainly revolve around impromptu and informal activities such as watching television or simply “hanging out” with their neighbours.

Entwisle and Alexander’s work further highlights how children from low-income families are more often identified as being at risk for serious academic and adjustment problems. In Singapore, many teachers claim that they could identify problematic potential students “in the making” early on based on their family background, behavior in class and academic performance. Thus, they receive lower teacher ratings on behavior related to school adjustment such as attention span and interest in learning. Many educators who have worked with these children expressed how they were sensitive about how they compared to their peers, demonstrating class consciousness This sense of inferiority is perpetuated by the reductionist stereotypes some teachers possess of them, citing their fall behind as a result of “low motivation”. Consistent with a looking-glass perspective, validation support within a given context is highly predictive of relational self -worth within that context. Specifically, it is this detrimental labeling of children which culminates in a self-fulfilling prophecy that shapes learning behaviors. In the early years of a child’s education journey, achievement trajectories are launched. While the Intelligence Quotient (IQ) gains of children in early schooling were small and transient, the evaluation of their academic performances had lasting effects in the long run and later life trajectories for them.

Marks are not only indicative of a child’s grasp of an academic subject, but also possesses a social-evaluative component to them. This affects a child’s perception of themselves and their subsequent test scores, following them in an accumulating dossier that later affects their life trajectory. As a result of these pejorative pre-conceived notions, some students from working class families may internalize stereotypes of being intellectually inferior to their more affluent peers, citing reasons such as stupidity and laziness for not doing better. Thinking of themselves as poor learners, these suffer from lack of motivation and self-esteem. These behavioral issues hence manifest in the form of disruptive class behavior or withdrawal from the school system, which has lasting effects on a child’s life in the long run. Ultimately, social class plays a pertinent role on the cultural logic of childbearing. The ideology of parentocracy is a symbolic manifestation which serves to mask the construction and engineering of structured social inequalities. By symbolizing choice, it therefore obscures the lack of choice of the disadvantaged because of their lack of socioeconomic capital to play the game of choice.