ABSTRACT
Willard Waller maintained that ‘parents and teachers are natural enemies, predestined each for the discomfiture of the other’. There is some evidence that the conflict between teachers and parents may be greater in England than in other English-speaking countries; but that teachers and parents in England are in fact in closer accord on educational issues than they realize. Teachers differed markedly from the views they ascribed to parents especially on the two items: ‘Emphasis on a broad range of goals in your classroom instruction’ and ‘Emphasis on social advancement in your instruction’. This chapter estimates to what extent teachers in different types of school and circumstances saw their roles as ‘diffuse’ or ‘restricted’; what weight they attached to different aspects of their work; what weight they thought parents expected them to give to different educational objectives; and what weight parents did, in fact, attach to these objectives.
