Education matters

A colleague of mine made a very interesting analogy about the problem of social media apps such as WhatsApp and communications between parents. ‘It is like Chinese Whispers’ she said, ‘In the morning a child will fall down and scrape their knee and after hundreds of messages are sent and exchanged, by the end of the day the poor child is dead!’

The problem isn’t that parents use WhatsApp to communicate about school; it is an incredibly useful means of passing information about homework or day-to-day affairs. 

The problem is the blurring of the lines between personal
 and parental context. 
This blurring happens because WhatsApp and other social media platforms are designed principally for friends and family to communicate and since friends and family use an entirely different style of language to communicate than say, a parent would traditionally with their child’s teacher, the language etiquette becomes blurred and that’s how the Chinese Whispers begin.

Let’s say a parent has a particular concern about a teacher or something that has happened at school, (this happens from time to time, you can’t please all of the people all of the time) the logical way in which to resolve this problem is to speak to the school about it and invariably find a solution and as is human nature, it is highly likely that this will be discussed by the parent with friends and family because it has been a part of their day and as such is ‘news’.  

However, I am starting to see a new phenomenon in which issues are discussed less frequently at source of the complaint i.e. the school and more frequently amongst parents in WhatsApp groups where they grow like snow balls.

This doesn’t help solve the problem, it often makes it worse by creating suspicion and antagonism.

This is because effectively when a WhatsApp group is created in reality what is actually formed is a gang and when one of the gang is unhappy, everyone is unhappy.

Sites like WhatsApp have made every comment and every thought instant and whilst they can’t be blamed for people’s general lack of integrity or the slow lingering death of the thought process, they can be blamed for feeding human nature’s need to be ‘instant’ and ‘included’ which in many ways has been the cause of this decline of common sense.

The phenomenon I am witnessing is at times becoming dangerous with, (in all seriousness) parents even using WhatsApp to coordinate mass visits to schools like angry mobs to complain about something really important when, in reality, it is actually one parent’s concern who is being backed up by the gang!

This is getting so serious across the island, the Ministry of Education actually banned parents and schools from communicating via WhatsApp and other social media sites in a bid to calm things down.

Like anything new, it will take time for WhatsApp to find its true value and schools, who are seeing a rise in the number of angry mobs standing at the gates with pitchforks and torches, need to consider how effective their communication practices with parents are.

If they aren’t clear, frequent and relevant, you can be pretty sure that there will be somebody complaining about it and, before long, a whole lot of other people complaining about it too.