Who is my children's educator?

I was just wondering aloud about how much time my children spent on school-related things. So I sat down and did a quick calculation. 7 hr of school each weekday; 6 hr of CCA a week; 2 hr homework each weekday; 2 hr Chinese tuition each week; 2 hr parental help on studies each week; 5 hr of homework/project work each weekend. Assuming 8 hr of sleep a day, and so an approx 112 waking hr per week, more than half of my children's waking hours in a typical week is on school-related things, and that is based on a conservative estimate.

Put in another way, for half of my children's lives, they are put in the hands of an "education provider" whom we have hardly any control over. Or, using modern parlance, I have subcontracted my parental education duties of my children to the schools for more than 50% of the time. Is it a wise move?

Well, I guess it depends on my view of education. If I think of education as giving them the market-recognized paper qualifications such as certificates and CVs stating their CCA accomplishments, then I think using the schools as a 50% subcontractor is quite a good bet. Moreover, schools provide them the social training that mirrors the kinds of working environments that they will be in later on in life and so this further contributes to their marketability. Well, I can go on to justify that the networks they build in school can form the nucleus to expand upon for business contacts in future.

What if I think of education in terms of building the habits/disciplines - physical, mental, and moral - that will hold them in good stead for the rest of their lives? This vision includes desirable life-long traits such as caring for others, having a healthy respect for every individual regardless of the person's status in society, being gracious, having the perseverance to see through a commitment, view life as more than a pursuit of material things etc. If this is how I view education for my children, then schools may seem quite inadequate to the task. [In fact, I sense that schools,unwittingly through their competitive environments, nurture values that are diametrically opposite of what I stated above]. To be fair, schools are not structured for these purposes. They have already more than enough on their plates fulfilling their goals of helping often unmotivated students achieve in examinations. No, the responsibility for this type of wholistic education must still fall back on my shoulders as a parent.

So how? I take a compromised approach: I view the schools as fulfilling mainly the first aspect of my children's education by way of equipping them with marketable assets; when they are with me, I maximize the opportunities for the other aspects of education that the schools are not equipped to do - the weightier fundamentals of what it means to live meaningfully.