Students should be able to attend class without having to worry about other students’ kids.
When you register for a class, you are agreeing to attend that class at an established place and time of the day. Nobody made you register for any specific class, and you can take whatever classes you want at your disposal.
Now, certainly there are students that need to take certain classes at certain times due to their work or family life, and that’s fine. But the time you commit to whatever class you do join needs to have your focus 100 percent.
I cannot give my complete attention when I am in a class with a child, and that’s just me sitting in on class with no ties to the kid whatsoever. I can only imagine how difficult it might be for a parent to focus in class while their kid is with them, or if they would have any focus on the material at all.
What If the kid started making any sort of loud noise or was being disruptive in any way? What if the kid needed to go to the restroom? Do you think the students or the teachers could progress with the material?
In a college course, a professor expects a certain level of maturity and respect that a kid just hasn’t developed yet. You can’t expect a kid to sit down in one place for one to two hours listening to one person talk the whole time. Kids’ attention spans are short, and there is no way they could get through a whole class without being some sort of distraction.
Then there is the argument that, well, if the parent has nobody to watch the child on a certain day, he or she has to bring the kid to their class. Well my argument is that you shouldn’t have signed up for that class at that time knowing you could potentially be stuck and have nobody to watch them.
Ann Hassenpflug wrote in “The Chronicle of Higher Education” that, “The sole reason that parents bring children to class is because their child-care arrangements didn’t work out.”
So if your child-care arrangements didn’t pan out, why should your fellow students suffer knowing their time in class won’t be quiet? The time during class is a time shared not just by one student and one teacher, but by everyone in the class. By bringing your kid to class you are basically saying that you are more important than every other student in the class because your kid’s needs to go first.
