Parents’ Expectations about Children’s Education Targets in the Future Perspective in Latvia

Abstract

Parents are important educational partners in schools as they are the first educators of their children and play an important role in their children’s education, educational targets, and future professions for their children. Parents have their expectations about their children’s educational targets but are these expectations connected with targets defined in education documents, and more important – are these expectations aimed at the future perspective of education? The purpose of the study was to compare the educational targets of parents with educational targets defined in education documents – Latvia education system change project “School 2030” (Skola 2030), Sustainable Development Strategy of Latvia until 2030, and UNESCO new social contract for education for 2050. The methodology used in this study was an express – survey for parents, in May 2022, with the open question “What do you expect for your child’s educational targets?”; literature and source analysis with mapping review strategy, documents detecting the perspective of the education; finding educational target keywords, analysing data, and synthesising categories with data collected in express – survey; data analysis was done using data identifying method by selected keywords. Analysing three educational documents with the future perspective, 7 educational targets as keywords were found and analysed – curricula and skills, cooperation and collaboration, digitalization, inclusion, sustainability, research and innovations, and globalisation. 240 respondents participated in the express survey, detecting the problem of the research, that parents’ expectations only partly overlap educational targets defined in education documents. Analysing survey data, family and parents cannot be considered as educational partners in the educational process as is shown in literature and document analysis. There are two main survey answer tendencies – child-centred education and education based on knowledge and achievements. Parents’ behaviour is customer – centred, what is that school can provide for a child’s education.