2.2 Weaknesses and Drawbacks

If my aim in dealing in the previous part with the big problems and challenges which stand in the way of parental, educational practices in the Muslim countries was to draw attention to a series of hindering factors, particularly poverty, ignorance and the shrinkage of the role of the family, all of which are not necessarily the responsibility of the individual and his choices because they depend on society's structures and orientations; my attention in this part will be given to mainly focusing on a series of weaknesses and drawbacks which are also factors that hinder the effectiveness of these practices and are the responsibility of the parents to a larger extent.

2.2.1 Lack of a Pedagogical Education

As every educational practice, true parental education is the one which is guided by a practical pedagogical education. Without this pedagogical supervision, it is impossible for any parental education to achieve its objectives and goals on the level of practice. More accurately, it will not go, as it is the case with the majority of parental, educational practices in Muslim countries, beyond mere oscillating, temperamental attitudes; swinging, haphazard behaviours and contradictory extreme treatments. The following indications may serve as a way of illustration here :

a) Vacillation between Authoritarianism and Indulgence

The parents' acceptance of the child is the first standard measurement of the success of their educational method. This attitude alone creates an atmosphere of security which is necessary for the development of the child's personality and the completion of his social integration. However, this primary educational dimension is usually emptied of its real sense in the Muslim World, when we consider it in the context of the determinants of authoritarianism or indulgence within the process of parents-child relationship. On the one hand, we notice that a child who lives, in our society, in an atmosphere of domination rarely feels secure or learns what the parents expect of him, because education as a practice is still reduced here to the level of orders and coercion instead of guidance and advice, and to pressure, rigor and domination instead of understanding, tolerance and freedom at times. Therefore, this kind of practice is in contradiction with the spirit of every parental education that is built on reasonable degrees of sound authority and genuine freedom. On the other hand, any child who lives in an atmosphere of indulgence, where excessive freedom predominates, rarely finds the adequate climate for his psychological opening and the development of his competencies, because indulgence as an educational practice still means for us neglect and carelessness instead of reasonable guidance and appropriate supervision. Since a child's true potentialities are not taken into consideration in this indulgent treatment, the parents do not discover its negative consequences on the future of the child, the family and society till it is too late.

Within the context of this attempt to define the parents' attitude toward accepting the child, I should mention that the authority and indulgence dualism, which imposes itself on the level of the unsteady equilibrium between the contradictory principles of authority and submission, apparently constitute one of the major problems of our parental education. If "maternal tenderness, affection and love are among the primary elements which help the development of a child's personality, affection, social relations and knowledge acquisition; the authority of the father is the basis which completes a balanced education of the child, for it makes him aware of his individuality and conscious of the existence of the other and the necessity of being open to society” (Wery 1974, p.51). It should be mentioned here that the role of the father appears to be more momentous because many things are required of him, the first of which is to avoid the duality of excessiveness in educational practices that are guided by the inclination either to excessive authority or to negative indulgence, so that he could stick to a balanced educational activity which is the firm basis of every flexible and strong personality capable of adaptation and assuming responsibility. He should be aware, as will be seen in due course, of how to perform his educational duty so as to be able to prepare the integration of his children in a world characterised by continuous development and change. It is a big and decisive role, indeed, but it is difficult and arduous.

b) Vacillation between Exclusion and Overprotection

As already mentioned, the parents' acceptance of the child is the primary condition for his psychological opening and the achievement of his adaptation. But there are a lot of cases where the parents do not play their role in protecting and helping the child. For they neglect him and do not give him the least consideration for his practical potentialities and real means. This negative educational practice is mostly reflected in our Muslim societies in two main attitudes :

On the one hand, there is the attitude of rejection or exclusion which appears in its authoritarian or arbitrary form as a desire to subject the child, to debase, disable and disqualify him so as to get rid of his troublemaking and problems. As to its appearance in the form of indulgence or tolerance, this attitude varies from simple indulgence to carelessness, ending in complete neglect.

On the other hand, there is the attitude of excessive protection illustrated by an educational practice that is governed by the parents' excessive care of the health of the child, his protection and education, thus making him live in a false and artificially embellished world. Actually, the same aforementioned duality linked with the attitude of rejection is also found here with all its components, mainly reflected in domination or subjection. If this attitude under its form of excessive domination in protection aims primarily at making the child fit a defined model, either arbitrary or forcibly; it is, under its form of excessive indulgence in neglect, always more reformative than is necessary, thus opening on some kind of exhibition, acute spoiling and anxiety.

Be it as it may, the negative attitude of the parents toward the child has dire consequences on his education and future, for he becomes a victim of appearances; namely negativism, carelessness, lies and aggressiveness, which we suffer from and live with daily in most contexts and families in Muslim countries. These are all aspects resulting from the child's lack of self-confidence and self-improvement, that is why (according to a large number of people) he becomes a failure at school, a vagrant in society and a criminal in his behaviour.

c) Vacillation between Contradictory Attitudes

One of the major aspects of the parental education, which is practised in many social milieux in the Muslim World and proves these practices' lack of any pedagogy, is the vacillating attitude that some parents adopt as an educational method which is inconsistent, hesitant and does not stick to a firm conduct or fixed rules in educating the child. These parents do not treat their child in the same way in similar situations; on the contrary, there is an oscillation that may reach a degree of contradiction in their attitudes. For we find them continuously vacillating between authority and weakness, acceptance and rejection, complete neglect and excessive protection. This ambiguity in their attitudes, which is governed by the personal temperament of the parents, usually throws the child into a climate of terror and fear, completely lacking in any educational value.

2.2.2 The Lack of a Psychological Frame of Reference

Starting from the aspects and characteristics of parental, educational practices in Muslim countries, particularly the ones we described as negative, we can assert that the majority of these practices lacks in any psychological frame of reference, and essentially child-psychology which is one of the strong pillars of every parental education. Since it is the theory that every father or mother has about the psychology of his / her children which provides the main frame of reference for the kind of educational treatments and practices he/she reserves for his / her children, these methods and practices may vary from right to wrong, effective to ineffective, positive to negative, according to the nature of this theory. As long as it is scientific or semi-scientific so as to be based on accurate pedagogical and psychological, data and knowledge, it leads its adherent to rely in his treatment of his children on methods whose results are sure and beneficial because of its flexibility, commitment, rationality, warmth and good supervision. As long as it is superstitious and naïve, as it is unfortunately the case with that of a large number of fathers and mothers in Muslim societies, so that it is built on ideas and events that are either imaginary or inaccurate, it leads its adherent to useless educational practices whose results are limited because of its vacillation, haphazardness and contradictory nature.

2.2.3 The Lack of an Educational Strategy

The lack of an educational strategy with defined objectives and firm measures is one of the main weaknesses of the parental education practised in Muslim countries. This is a fact that cannot be denied or neglected because the reality of this education testifies to this in more than one of its aspects, among which are the following most important ones :

a) The Paucity of Supervision and Orientation

The absence of the mother's affection and the father's authority is a complete disaster as far as the education of a child and the achievement of his psychic and social integration are concerned. If the lack of motherly affection, in our Muslim societies, is the result of a lot of factors, the first of which are the absence of some mothers from home because of their professional occupations and the carelessness of others because of their selfishness, immaturity or terrible psychological and living conditions; the lack of the authority of the father usually springs from the actual absence of the latter either because of his continuous work or his deviant conduct, or because of his abandonment at home to the satisfaction of his desires or enjoyment of his preferred hobbies to such an extent that his presence is not different from his absence, or finally because of the death or illness of one of the parents, etc. In this context it should be mentioned that the degree of a child's knowledge of his parents and his affection for them does not depend, as the majority of people imagine, on the number of hours they spend with him, but mainly depends on the type of this parenthood and all the ways of treatment and educational methods that it resorts to. Wise fatherhood and motherhood, as will be seen later, are not gauged by  the number  of hours spent in the house but depend, on the one hand, on the amount of love, friendship and attention given to a child and, on the other hand, on what the parents provide him with in terms of the types of pedagogical stimulation and motivation, consisting particularly in controlling his behaviours, ethicizing his conduct and developing his relationships by teaching him moral values and the conventions of interaction and communication and by helping him acquire the knowledge and representations related to identity. This means that it is wrong to see the absence of the father or the mother from home in terms of a situation that would deprive the family only of an  important source of revenue which satisfies all demands and needs; on the contrary, there is a stronger argument than this, namely this absence or deprivation makes both the family and the child lose the elements of psychological contact, educational supervision and pedagogical orientation, all of which are the essential components of the  parental education we aspire after in the Muslim countries. In other words, an education which will achieve the development of the child and his social integration through a series of  strategies consisting mainly in self-discipline, adjustment and cooperation.

b) The Limitedness of the Parents’ Competence

If we take into consideration the parents' educational conceptions and their representations of their roles and parental competencies in Muslim countries, we may come to a conclusion of paramount importance, namely that these conceptions and representations do not in the case of the majority of social strata generally inspire confidence and satisfaction, because the concept of parental competence, which is defined by the majority of Western studies (Terrisse and Dansereau 1990, Allès-Jardel 1997, Massé 1991, Gibaud-Watson 1977) as a multi-dimensional concept, is usually reduced by a large number of parents in Muslim countries to personal qualities and mainly the emotional dimension. As a result of this, such a type of parents rarely pay enough attention to themselves as educators, and thus do not really value the concept of parental competence and the very effective educational role that it asks for in terms of yield and satisfaction. It is a concept whose meaning can be embodied by three groups of characteristics necessary for every effective practice of parental competence :

- the first group is that the suitable human specificities such as : availability, presence, attention, emotional warmth, responsibility, patience, capacity for adaptation, all of which the parents should have.

- the second group consists in the following qualities : a good, satisfaction of all the needs of the child and the capacity for listening to him and providing him with affection and tenderness, all of which the parents should have.

- the third group lies in the parent's skill in providing the suitable conditions for the child's development such as : stability, discipline, formation, education, supervision and the capacity for rendering the child's development more effective with regard to many human qualities such as : independence, shrewdness, equilibrium, adherence to values, assuming responsibility and loving life.

c) Giving Priority to Emotional Education over Cognitive Education  :

Just as there is almost a complete consensus on the importance of parental education and its role in the constitution of a child's personality, the achievement of his psychological equilibrium and the shaping of his moral conscience through various educational methods, there is another no less significant consensus on the importance of a child's early experiences and the effectiveness of his spontaneous and natural acquisition of knowledge in providing the real foundations for the development of his mental capacities and knowledge competencies. The difference between the two consensus is that the first is shared by everybody - both common people and scientists, while the second one is a fact whose importance is understood only by specialists in the fields of psychology, education and sociology.

Those who partake of the first consensus see that parental education in Muslim countries has undergone palpable changes, for its function has shifted from an extended one with diverse roles to a small one with limited roles. Consequently, it has given up an important part of its function - namely its knowledge imparting role to the school. The majority of Arab-Islamic discussions, which resort to simplistic theses on child-education prevalent in the 1950's, played a role in validating the opinion of those who advocate the reduction of the function of the parents to the level of emotional, moral and behavioral education; the child, thus becomes a weak, incapable and intelligence-lacking being, who requires nothing more than answering his material needs and satisfying his emotional desires, hence the neglect and discarding of all that is related to the cognitive aspects till he reaches school-age. This resulted in turning the role of the parents in the education of their child in general and the improvement of his knowledge competencies in particular into a minor one, which is limited in time and place. Their interventions, which take place only inside the house, do not go beyond the first three or four years of the child's life, thus leaving room after that and once for all to the school. But the question to be asked is : is it really right to reduce the parents' educational function to this psychological and social role which qualifies it as a function that specializes only in emotions and moralities ? To what extent is the parental education practised in Muslim countries right in adopting a method which concentrates only on values and morals, while neglecting the knowledge imparting aspect, especially that what society needs nowadays are individuals who have first-class competencies, knowledge and skills ? More than this, to what extent can we say that parental education is teaching not only morals and behaviours but also knowledge and productive capacities ?           

On the basis of the reality of parental education, as it is reflected at present in the findings of the majority of psychological studies, and the role it plays in the development of a child and his adaptation through its treatment methods; we clearly see that the previous attitude, in spite of its importance, remains limited because the aim of every parental education -though part of it is embodied in what is psychological and social- consists in its other part in what is educational and intellectual. Here lies the importance of the second attitude. Though there has been a consensus on the latter attitude since the beginning of the century, particularly on the level of considering a human being as a phenomenon of progress and development and as a system of learning and acquisition, its scientific justifications and practical dimensions have not yet crossed the boundaries of the systems of parental education, as it is practised in Muslim countries, and have hardly touched its treatment methods. After all, this is only natural, for these justifications and dimensions had not been ripe enough and available till the 1980's, especially when it became practically obvious that the process of acquiring knowledge, developing competencies and learning skills should not be restricted only to the school. Even though the latter is the only institution which competes with the parents on the level of the comprehensive nature of their roles, the parents, in their turn, are now asked to contribute to this process of acquisition for scientific reasons, the  most important of which are :

- The consideration of the child as an intellectual being, as well as a biological and psychological one. From an early age, he possesses knowledge competencies in language, understanding, thinking and calculus.

- The importance and efficacy of simple knowledge (not the one got at school) which the child acquires spontaneously and naturally, and its role in his adaptation and problem-solving.

- Giving prominence to the importance of social interactions for a child development and learning through the advisory and mediating roles which the other can play -particularly the parents- in the process of knowledge acquisition.

- Stressing the importance of the educational activities shared by the parents and the school for the adaptation of the child, his acquisition of knowledge and the shaping of his school performance.

Having taken these considerations into account, we point out that the parental education which we should call for and promote in Muslim countries is the one which has to combine two complementary roles : one is psycho-social, the other is educational-cognitive. In other words, it is that education which is required to fulfil its vital role, an important part of which it has given up for a long time to the school - either under the pretence that knowledge acquisition and the development of competencies is the domain of the school, or by claiming that its role has shrank due to the cultural and social changes which had an impact on the social milieux of its active members.