By Dr. Jeff Mirus ( bio - articles - email ) | Nov 12, 2024
One of the great things about the growth of home schooling and various cooperative arrangements is that it puts control of education back into the hands of parents. I don’t mean that it is essential for those who are parents to control the education of children generally. I mean that parents must retain control of the education of their own children.
This has been reaffirmed many times by the Church, including in the Second Vatican Council’s Declaration on Christian Education (Gravissium Educationis).* While the shift of control of education to the State has made it easier for many parents to “send their children to school”, the increasingly ideological character of education in the modern world has created an Orwellian nightmare of totalitarian and semi-totalitarian indoctrination. In schools throughout the West today, children are continuously “carefully taught” the spiritual and moral equivalent of “black is white and white is black.” In fact, ideological “correctness” is now generally prized above academic quality right through college and graduate school.
The problem is so serious that it is relatively easy in most modern communities today for parents to do a better and far more wholesome job of educating their own children or at least retaining control over their education through various kinds of independent cooperative efforts. (I know far more about my own country’s situation, but this is certainly true in other places as well.) In America, some locations and some states make this easier than others, but rarely can it be said any longer that home-schooled and cooperatively-schooled children lag behind their peers in public schools. And by the time these students spend a year or two at independent colleges and universities which are unrestricted by federal and state funds, their average intellectual and moral maturity reveals itself to be far higher than the secular norm.
Through the dominant public methods of education in the United States, in fact, students are most generally taught to think not clearly but ideologically. Both intellectually and morally, such education is a deadly poison.
Responsibilities and charisms
I am writing here of the norm. Obviously, in individual cases some parents will do a very poor job of educating their children, just as they will do a very poor job of raising them well at all. But the biggest impediment is the perceived lack of alternatives to the public schools. Whether in the United States or elsewhere, therefore, the Church must play an important role in education—not perhaps primarily through traditional parish and diocesan schools, but especially by raising awareness of and providing spiritual and even material support for home-schooling and what I call cooperative schooling. It is not too much to say that we also need new religious communities to embrace the very Catholic mission of supporting and enhancing home and cooperative school efforts, offering active involvement in these forms of education as well as other kinds of support to struggling families.
There was a time when it was quite common for new religious communities to devote themselves to the education of orphans and the children of the poor. A revival of authentic religious charisms in the service of enriching home and cooperative educational opportunities may well be just as important now as was the running and staffing of formal parish and diocesan schools just a few generations ago. The Church, of course, has her own obligation to form and educate in the name of Christ Himself, but it is no longer obvious that this obligation is best fulfilled through the restriction of her efforts to Mass, CCD, sacramental formation and formal parochial schools. The time is ripe for each parish to have a Catholic education facilitator on staff who can at the very least orient parishioners to the benefits of home schooling and the possibilities of cooperative schooling in the parish region. Already in the best dioceses of the United States, bishops and Diocesan superintendents of education are becoming engaged with and supporting home schooling and cooperative schooling in their regions.
These efforts need to be mandated by bishops and expanded through our parishes. The Church may well be able to do far more now through facilitation of parents in the education of their own children than she can do, in many places at least, through the establishment of traditional parish and diocesan schools. The Church is indeed both mater et magistra(mother and teacher), but this does not mean heronly or even her best course today is to educate through schools that are simply Catholic versions of the public norms.
Read the rest: https://www.catholicculture.org/commentary/education-must-be-controlled-by-childs-parents/
