How important was education to your family of origin?

Big ol’ 10, but without the understanding of why it was so important, it was just a given. I grew up privileged in the North East.
As an adult, I realized the value of the education I got.
I passed that on to my family.

Very highly. My parents didn’t have a ton of money when I was growing up but they managed to send each of us to the small, liberal arts college of our choice. Good grades were a given and discussions were frequent. My background is Jewish and my parents came from NYC.

And yes, the value of education was passed on to my sons. They both went to college and one has a PhD. Even more surprisingly, they both found work in their chosen field of study.

Probably a 9. Missouri, 1990’s, plain ole white bread Americana in the Midwest.

We chose not to have children, but I stress the value of education on nieces and nephews.

Growing up, I would say 8 though my mother valued education more highly than my father. I felt education was very important to my children and I would say an 8 again. White Anglo Saxon Protestant living in Scotland.

We were royalty from southern Scotland, with a family crest.
I think my great great great uncle attended West Point and was the Confederacy’s greatest general until he was killed by a stray bullet at Shiloh.

Not very. I think if any of us had been a boy, it would have been different. However, Dad did pay for a couple of years of college. But then I came home at Christmas break during my sophomore year. He and Mom had divorced by then, she was gone, and he told me I didn’t really need a college degree. All I had to do was find a man to take care of me, and he cut off my funding. It really threw my life completely out of wack. I had plans that never got realized. I did exactly what he suggested. Found “a man,” and you guys know the rest of THAT story.
In the end, finally, all three of us girls did get college degrees one way or another.

About a 6. My parents never pressured us to do our homework.
I will add that neither of my parents graduated from high school as teens, though my Mom went to adult school in her 30’s, and got her diploma.

My dad graduated with a double E from Texas Tech. He went to school on the GI bill. If he hadn’t he probably would have gone to work in the oil fields of Texas, instead of becoming a high ranking Boeing manager.
Mom didn’t go to college.

I grew up in Los Angeles in the late 1970’s through the 1980’s.

My father (Mexican-American, originally from Texas) never paid any interest in our education. All my mother (white lady, originally from Missouri) ever said was she didn’t want stupid children. Still, they cared about our grades until like 6th or 7th grade. After that, they didn’t seem to care about us at all, including our education. I was definitely never expected to go to college, but I ended up going on my own dime with will power as my only motivation. I am still the only person in my extended family to graduate from college. I never had kids so that does not apply. I have encouraged my niece to go to college. We’ll see how that goes.

Overall, I’d say about a 3.

@kritiper Is that true? Wow!

Yes, it’s true.

Ecksteemlee sow.
If I were to score it on a tediously twee 1–10 scale it would be less than 10 but more than 8.
So yeah, a solid 7 then…i fink.

This is a tricky question for me to answer.

If you asked my parents if education was important to them, they would say yes. Yet my dad used to threaten to not drive me to school whenever he was mad at me. Go figure.

They would ask us occasionally if we were doing well in school. But didn’t always ask to see our report card or anything.

I think it partly had to do with them being immigrants. They assumed that their children understood the system more than they did. And trusted us to monitor our own progress.

This worked fine for me and my sisters. Didn’t work very well for my brother who would often lie.

Help with homework was a struggle because of the language barrier. While I spoke both languages fairly well on a day-to-day basis, calculus terminology was a whole ‘nother thing.

It ended up with my dad yelling at me that he was an engineer and that he wasn’t stupid. And me in tears saying that I didn’t think he was stupid. Just that I only learned these calculus terms in English. Didn’t ask for help again.

When we moved and transferred schools, I asked them to change schools because the new school was so bad. The work I was doing in Spanish class was two years behind. And I was tutoring seniors in math as a sophomore. People were sleeping in class and the teacher didn’t even care. Heck…one time a guy left and came back with a burrito and the teacher didn’t even care.

My parents didn’t understand that not all schools were at the same level. They just wanted me to try my hardest and that was good enough for them. I had to get my school counselor and a social worker involved to get transferred to another school on my own.

So…they would say education was important to them. But they didn’t do much to help the process. But maybe the lack of help made me more independent? Who knows.

Good story @raum. Part of it reminds me of my ex who was going to ground our oldest from going to her awards ceremony for getting on the Deans Honor Roll as punishment for some infraction. I made damn sure she got there.

It got progressively more important with the generations. Both of my parents have graduate degrees and they were adamant about me and my siblings going to college. Their parents were more mixed: my maternal grandfather was a Stanford-educated rocket scientist, my paternal grandfather didn’t have any education past elementary school. But it seems that educated or not, people in my family saw the value in an education and encouraged it in their children. Can’t think of any relatives who were hostile or indifferent to getting an education.