Trinity,
You asked I go into more detail on how teachers see education versus parents.
It really boils down to "what" to think versus "how" to think. I am not sure many parents understand the difference between being educated and having knowledge.
In the public (and most private) education sectors the goal is the education. Let's take reading for instance. We often start with the basics when teaching children how to read, rather it be whole language or phonics based - in the school system we first teach "reading" well before "reading comprehension". Now think about it, does it make sense to teach children word recognition before word understanding? Not really. But we do anyway.
Think about this: when you read to your child when they are little, we often read nursery rhymes, stories, etc. However, when we are about to try and "teach" our children to read - the books actually get less complex. No longer beautiful fairy tales or adventures, we are down to one or two words per page and we get excited because our children can "read".
No, they can not read; they can word call. Is reading apart from understand, comprehension, following the story line really reading?
When people used to be taught at home or self taught, or even the one room school house we didn't teach phonics. But, when the emphasis became more mass education and we had to "prove" we really taught people - we began to simply concepts of reading and break them down. Some of that may be because we want to "teach" children to "read" a little too early, some because we have to teach children at so many different levels at the same time, and part because educators have to be "judged" by some standard.
But, imgaine asking a 4 year old to tell you a story. They are very elaborate, exciting, etc. Then look at the books we ask 4 year olds to read. They must actually digress in their imagination and intelligence in order to word call for us. It isn't until some years later (as late as 3rd grade in some places) before we get back to emphasizing reading comprehension, that words are written for a reason, that stories should flow and make sense.
So, when we send our kids off to school to be educated we have to understand that for the most part, in a vast majority of public and private schools - they are not expanding their knowledge. They are, especially in the early years, simply learning to be evaluated by a set of standards that doesn't have a lot to do with deep knowledge, but with somewhat shallow standards.
Teachers aren't to blame - this has been going on for a long time in the U.S.A. And the main reason is that public education was never created for knowledge transfer. If you really take the time to study it (I warn you, it will be depressing), the purpose of mass education was to create workers for the industrial revolution. So, while we definitely need to prepare our kids for the work world, it is really up to us parents to instill in them true knowledge and a quest for deep understanding.
