Essay topic:
#2 Do you agree or disagree with the following statement? Parents are the best teachers. Use specific reasons and examples to support your answer.
Who are the best teachers in our lives? In my opinion, the first teachers we have in our lives in most cases are our parents. They teach us to walk, to speak, and to have good manners before we go out into the real world. More than the professional teachers that we have in school, parents are generally the most involved in the development and education of children.
The main reason for my point of view is that our parents are the best teachers at the beginning of everybody's lives, which actually corresponds to parents' role in nature. Parents are the most committed and involved in teaching their children; they have a kind of instinct to sacrifice a part of themselves for the betterment of their children. They love their children and have great patience while passing down their knowledge to us. They wish us a success and thus will not teach us bad things. And of course, implicit learning occurs when children unconsciously copy some of their parents' habits and styles of behavior.
Furthermore, during the second stage of a child's development, adolescence, parents can still be in the best position to offer advice even though the children might not accept it. In this case, perhaps the child's friends would be the best teachers. Adolescents are notoriously rebellious in many cultures and may automatically reject any advice from their parents. My marriage, for instance, was solely a matter of doing the opposite of what my parents wanted when they tried to intrude in offering their advice. So in such matters, parents should be much more flexible and understand their children. We can see that being a teacher of growing child becomes more and more complicated as time passes and many parents are simply not able to meet the increased demands.
On the other hand, I would say that parents are not professional teachers and they tend to be very biased by their love of their children. So wishing good things and an easy life for them may prevent children from maturation. In any case, usually parents can present only one viewpoint of the world, while good teaching should be based on different attitudes. Thus, when children go to school and have a great diversity of teachers, they learn much more than their parents could possibly teach them. Furthermore, once our parents get older, they become more conservative and cannot always be objective in regard to modern trends and fashions.
Thus, we need to take their advice with caution during that time period. While parents are not the ideal teachers, and well-rounded children will generally need a great diversity of teachers in their lives in order to have a more accurate view of the world, parents are generally the most committed of all teachers and have the greatest emotional investment in their children and their future.