The significance of parents' evaluations of their own school for their educational attitudes

The study set out to examine parents' evaluations of the school they had attended and the role of these evaluations in the formation of parental attitudes towards education. A group of vocationally educated (N = 343) and a group of academically educated (N = 231) parents were asked to think back to their primary school days and evaluate the functioning of their school; they were also requested to indicate their opinions on a set of attitude statements and to predict their preschool-aged child's future direction in secondary education. The parents' evaluation of their schools averaged at 'satisfactory', with the highest grade given to the quality of the instruction and the lowest grades to the giving of encouragement and the capability of taking individual needs into consideration. The school evaluations were organized by the school generation and, in particular, by the educational position of the subject, so that those parents who had gone to the (new) comprehensive school and those who were university-educated gave more positive evaluations of their schools than did those who had gone to the (old) folk school and those who were vocationally educated. The critical educational attitudes corresponding to the educational position of the academically educated parents were enhanced if their evaluation of their own school was negative, whereas the positive educational attitudes corresponding to the educational position of the vocationally educated parents were enhanced if their evaluation of their own school was positive. With the vocationally educated parents, their school evaluation also organized their prediction of their child's secondary education: a positive evaluation raised and a negative evaluation lowered the likelihood of vocational education as the predicted alternative.