"It takes a village to raise a child. The education of our children is the task of community as a whole, not merely the province of the teachers and local school administrators".

When I ponder over the interesting and thought provoking question of whether the onus of imparting education to children lies on the entire community or only on teachers and local school administrators, I reach the conclusion that the task of educating children is indeed incumbent on all the members of community.

To begin with, a child has a very impressionable mind and it is not just confined to books and texts, and hence the entire gamut of education of children extends beyond that. They need to be taught much more than three the R's; for example, social values, ethics, aesthetics, independent thoughts etc., and the teachings at school do not necessarily cover each of these entirely. Quite a few of these have to be inculcated by family, peer groups and other responsible members of society as well.

Furthermore, education is an eternal process and the children spend only a few hours inside the school premises, and the hours beyond that also matter significantly for the learning and upbringing of a child. Quite often it has been witnessed that the extra-curricular or beyond the book activities a child indulges in after the school hours play a significant role in shaping of an individual and the ultimate choice of a career path for himself. For example, the biggest innovators and scientists in history as Thomas Edison used to experiment and pursue the path of knowledge on their own after school-hours, and their activities to satisfy their own curiosity resulted in benefits to whole mankind.

Then again, it is also quite possible that children may get influenced by demagoguery or by the pedantic influences of mentors or fellow-students in school, in which case it becomes more and more necessary to disabuse the children of those false impressions by administering the correct ideas and beliefs so that their upbringing and subsequent outlook is not marred by nurturing of fallacies and prejudices.

It can be argued though that the teachers and the administrators play a cardinal role in the education of children as they are the people who lay the very foundations on which a child further builds up on his knowledge, and that by their proactive mentoring, monitoring and evaluation only it is ensured that the children imbibe the subjects they're meant to learn and thus attain the long term goals. This is more so in modern world where nucleus families and working married couples are prevalent.

However, it ought to be remembered that while the children definitely have their teachers as their main recourse to education, it cannot be assumed that teachers are the only means through which they learn and imbibe. Children often have their role models as sportsmen, actors, technical wizards etc., who they try to emulate and learn a lot in the process. Even from the perspective of academics too, the homework and the evaluation of test results, and the subsequent remedial measures require the assistance of parents and other mentors as elder siblings etc., to name a few.

Thus, in summary, while it is true to a great extent that teachers and school administrators are important for the education of the children, the other members of society also have very significant roles to play in the process of imparting education to the children. Especially for inculcating values beyond textbook knowledge as responsible behavior, kinship, camaraderie, sportsmanship etc., their role indeed complements the same of the teachers and other educational authorities.