Epstein believes that schools with "separation of home and school" treat children as students, while schools with "cooperation of home and school" treat students as children. That is to say, if the school only treats children as students, the school expects families to do what they should do, but the family leaves the responsibility of educating children to the school, then it may be found that the family and the school are separated; If educators regard students as children, they will find that in the process of children's education and development, family and community are the * * * collaborators of the school. Partners are aware of their common interests and responsibilities for their children, and they will work together to create better plans and opportunities for their children. As far as the traditional sociology of education is concerned, parents' participation in their children's education often has obvious social class differences, which are usually explained by two theories: the theory of family absence from the personal level and the theory of institutional discrimination from the institutional level.
The theory of family absence points out that families lacking cultural training or low educational level often participate less in their children's education because of the lack of educational tradition, parents' lack of attention to education, insufficient mastery of Chinese and insufficient motivation to pursue long-term educational achievements. In this theory, the problem parents or families are regarded as the core of the problem of low parental participation, and the mistakes of educational institutions are ignored.
The discrimination theory of educational institutions traces the difference of parents' participation to the "system" factor, rather than just putting the responsibility on parents themselves. This theory points out that educational institutions have prejudice and discrimination against parents and students from the lower classes, while ignoring a group with special needs. Therefore, in fact, it is some hidden discrimination style or exclusion measures in schools that exclude disadvantaged parents and prevent them from participating in their children's education. It is found that parents from low classes lack self-confidence when interacting with teachers, and even avoid some opportunities to meet with teachers, forming the phenomenon that parents choose "self-elimination"; Because educational institutions unconsciously belittle the participation potential of lower-class parents, most neglected parents become passive and may eventually lose their confidence and interest in participating in their children's education; If parents' socio-economic conditions simply can't afford any time to participate, there will be a situation of "direct refusal". For example, most single parents need to work full-time for their livelihood. They have neither flexible working hours nor enough energy, so their parents can't participate (bourdieu, Passer Long,1990; Huck, 1993).
In short, parents with insufficient conditions cannot participate in their children's education, because some invisible departments in the school exclude them. In the final analysis, it is not because the school intentionally discriminates against these parents, or because parents themselves do not care about their children; On the contrary, it is this implicit exclusion mechanism in the system that makes the general public accept that parents with poor conditions will inevitably participate less and their children's grades will inevitably be poor. Schools can blame parents, and parents can also blame schools. In the end, both sides believe that since the children of the lower class have no conditions, they can only accept the reality and create the results of social reproduction reasonably. Bourdieu divided capital into three forms: material forms, such as property and currency; Internalized forms, such as knowledge, attitude and skills; There are also institutionalized forms, such as academic qualifications. Coleman developed Bourdieu's explanation of capital in the book Basis of Social Theory. His empirical research, Coleman Report, adopts economic capital (measuring material resources, including income, owning a house, owning an expensive car, vacationing in hotels and owning yachts and other expensive consumer goods), cultural capital (general cultural background, knowledge, temperament and skills handed down from generation to generation) and social capital (responsibilities and expectations based on interpersonal networks).
Brown further revised Coleman's formula (Brown, 1998):
Academic achievement = material capital × human capital × social capital
According to Brown's formula, "academic achievement" refers to children's internalized knowledge, attitude and skills, "material capital" refers to learning tools and economic conditions that children can use, human capital refers to people's skills, such as parents' ability to volunteer as tutors, and "social capital" refers to the mutual support, norms and responsibilities of social members. Brown believes that if the school can effectively mobilize these three kinds of capital, it can enhance the learning efficiency of individual students and improve the whole. As far as social capital is concerned, creating social capital for children depends on three main factors: parents' participation in children's intimacy process, the stability of parent-child relationship and parents' ideology. In short, different forms of capital encourage them to participate in their children's education to varying degrees. For example, parents can spend their income on buying books to gain knowledge (material capital), helping their children finish their homework, or volunteering at school. Professionals or parents with prominent social status (social capital) often have important information and occupy a favorable position when negotiating with school personnel or choosing schools for their children. Parents' looks will also affect the communication between parents and teachers. Coleman and Brown's decomposition of the factors influencing students' academic performance is helpful for us to understand the relationship between family and school, and even the relationship between parents' participation and students' academic performance.
In the past few decades, the limitations of social capital in the study of parents' participation and children's growth come from social capital itself. First of all, the concepts of economic, human and social capital, which originated from the concept of capital, became vague and failed to become an accurate analysis tool. For example, in addition to the three basic capitals, some scholars have also expanded symbolic capital, language capital, academic capital, academic capital and power capital. Another definition is to equate "cultural capital" with social and economic status. Just as Lalu's application of the concept of "cultural capital" is ambiguous. Socio-economic status not only gives parents cultural capital (ability and confidence), but also brings them economic capital (income) and social capital (social network), which are helpful for parents to participate in their children's education. Thirdly, all these studies pay too much attention to the family background variables, but take the participation of schools and parents as the background, ignoring the relationship between systems and the superposition influence of these three variables when families, schools and communities cooperate.
Nevertheless, the study of social capital has great enlightenment to parents' cooperation. Further research on social capital shows that the parents of the lower class with less capital do not necessarily hold a negative attitude towards their children's education. Although some parents have limited social and economic conditions, they still choose to invest their limited resources in activities that they can cope with. Coleman believes that even parents with lower social and economic classes can have a high degree of parental participation. For example, the dropout rate of Catholic schools in the United States is lower than that of public schools, and their academic level is higher. This can be attributed to a sense of community belonging, and it can also be regarded as a kind of social capital existing in religious schools, and their parents are not all from the upper-middle class.
The research results of social capital tell us that the social capital created in families and schools through home-school cooperation can weaken the adverse effects of family economic conditions and community environment on children's growth, which is more important than material and cultural capital. Parents can spend time and energy to care for their children, establish good relations with their children, keep in touch with schools, and are willing to support their children's studies and participate in parent committees, which will establish a valuable social network, and this social capital will help their children's growth.
For oriental parents, the importance attached by traditional culture to education also affects their participation. For example, most parents in China have the tradition that "everything is inferior, only reading is high". This cultural norm makes parents try their best to spend time and energy at home to help their children learn. To some extent, it also enlightens us that home-school cooperation has a good cultural foundation in China. Home-school cooperation has a multidisciplinary perspective, and sociological research has played a great role in promoting it. Breakthrough points include social capital, social stratification and mobility, and family social function. According to sociological theory, family and school are two most important forces in the process of children's socialization. Only by strengthening the cooperation between them can we highlight their respective educational characteristics, form comprehensive strength and resultant force, and promote the smooth socialization of children. If there is only a school without a family, or only a family without a school, we can't undertake the detailed and complicated task of shaping people alone.
In other disciplines, from the perspective of pedagogy, education is a purposeful activity that affects people, and school education cannot be separated from family cooperation; From the perspective of management, parents' participation in supervision and decision-making can enhance their sense of responsibility in school management and improve the quality of education; From the evolution of parents' right to education, parents are both legal guardians of their children and taxpayers, and the right to education is an integral part of parents' rights; From the perspective of system science, home-school cooperation is the performance of cooperation among subsystems in the education system, which makes the education system develop towards a balanced, harmonious and orderly state.