Must parents have written contracts with children?

Editor, RE: “Should students sign performance contracts with their parents?” (The New Times, February 1). A written performance contract between students and parents is not only a bad idea but also dangerous and should not be promoted at all by the Ministry of Education. However, parents should continue to have discussions with their children and encourage them to be serious about their studies. I believe most serious parents do this anyway. In my view, at the beginning of the term, parents should always encourage their children to always be punctual in class, to always complete their assignment on time, to be attentive in class all the time, to consider all subjects as important, to like all their teachers and equally, to always ask help from teachers and fellow students in case of need, and to never use social media before completing their assignments or before their revision time. Any form of contract should be from the parent telling the child that if you do all the above and score high marks, you will be rewarded with this or that. It is also not proper to try to compare this with performance contracts between employers and employees. An employee is hired to do a job they are already qualified to do and has already signed a work contract with their employer regarding what is expected of them. Prior to being hired, the employee must have read the job description and determined that he is able to do it. A student, on the other hand, is learning new things and cannot guarantee that they will understand them at such a level that will enable them hit a certain score all the time. Promoting the signing of performance contracts between parents in a country where a large number of our population is semi-literate can be catastrophic if there is no guidance from higher authority on what will happen if a student does not meet the performance. I do not also believe that the Ministry of Education is ready to set rules prescribing what will be in the contracts and what will happen if a student fails to meet the performance contract (to me setting such rules would be an intrusion in peoples lives and no authority would have a right to do that). In some countries where excessive pressure to perform in school is exerted on children, some children end up committing suicide because they have not scored high marks. Suicide is not very common in our country but you are likely to see cases of serious crimes being committed on children in form of punishment for failure to meet their performance contract. Seth

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Must parents have written contracts with children?