Homeschooling Is Not the Ideal

[N.B: Essays appearing on Homiletic & Pastoral Review have been deemed to be compatible with the teaching of the Church, but do not necessarily reflect the opinions of HPR. Fr. Meconi and his staff have always been grateful for the hard work of homeschooling parents and how they extend the Kingdom of God into the world through their love and care of God’s littlest ones.]

INTRODUCTION: A Fictitious Fantasy

The year is 1230 A.D., and the Countess Theodora (wife of Landulph, Count of Aquino) is about to send her ninth child, her five-year-old son, Thomas, to the Benedictine monastery for school, the tradition of her time. Suddenly, the life and thought of many prominent twenty-first century American Catholic mothers enters into her soul from the future. Rapt in a vision, she then awakens and thinks, “No, the natural path to education is in the home. I am the primary educator. I will educate my little Thomas myself.” Sadly, she does, and the mind of the greatest thinker in Catholic history is never fully trained, for Theodora has minimal education herself. Thomas Aquinas learns to cook and hunt and get along with friends. He learns the rudimentary way of living as a Catholic, but he never gets to a point where he can study with St. Albert the Great. The Church is blessed with a holy man when Thomas turns 18, and, for that matter, it gains a very holy woman in his mother, who has grown in virtue through her service to the Church having taken on a Cross of magnificent proportion. However, in the end, the Church loses a Doctor; we never get St. Thomas Aquinas, the Angelic and Common Doctor. Although Theodora was the primary educator, she and her husband lost sight of the need for their children to have secondary professional educators.

Thesis

This introductory novelistic absurdity is meant to illustrate an important point that seems on the verge of being lost in certain circles of Catholicism today: Although homeschooling moms (and dads) are, at times, heroic, homeschooling is not the ideal. There is a higher, better way: the Catholic School. Unlike the homeschool, the Catholic School, when it does what it is supposed to do, provides expertise in teaching, a community that completes the family, role models and authority figures, and a properly formative peer group. Parents must reclaim the proper understanding of what it means to be their children’s primary educator. “Primary” does mean first, but it certainly does not mean secondary. The parent as primary educator can only form a child for the first society (the family) but is never sufficient in forming the child for the secondary order (civil society) or the highest order (the Church); only these further elements of society bring education to perfection.

Clarifications

Although we aim to demonstrate that homeschooling is not the ideal, we need to make three prefatory clarifications. First, homeschooling must always be protected as a right for parents. This right of parental choice is fundamental to Church teaching, is enshrined in canon law, and flows from natural law by the principle of subsidiarity.¹ Second, sometimes homeschooling is the only option available to parents for best fulfilling their mandate to provide a Catholic education to their children. Third, the heroic efforts of many homeschoolers today are laudable and constitute a real path to sanctification. Nothing of what follows should be understood as taking away from these three points. Rather, we wish to make clear that the work of homeschooling should not be seen as the ideal towards which we must strive, rather a burden imposed on families due to unfortunate circumstances. These circumstances, however, are not as ubiquitous as they once were, and it is important that we do not miss the opportunities to seize what is much closer to the ideal: the education found in faithful Catholic schools.

Expertise

The most immediate difference between the homeschool and the Catholic school is the level of experience which the teacher brings to the educational environment. According the United States government, the average Catholic school teacher has 15.6 years of teaching experience; this is nearly two more than the average public school teacher and who knows how much more than the average homeschooling parent.² Although some Catholic schools may hire, at times, young or inexperienced teachers, by and large the direction from the Church is that teachers should be outstanding in faith and morals³ and masters in instructional method. The Second Vatican Council instructs as follows: “Let teachers recognize that the Catholic school depends upon them almost entirely for the accomplishment of its goals and programs. They should therefore be very carefully prepared so that both in secular and religious knowledge they are equipped with suitable qualifications and also with a pedagogical skill that is in keeping with the findings of the contemporary world.”⁴ No one would argue that either or even both parents could have all of the training and prudence for every subject that veteran teachers possess in one or two subjects.

Community

The school is a community that “completes” the family (the “insufficient society”); as human institution and part of the body of Christ it is an aspect of the natural and supernatural common good. Pope Pius XI writes that:

In the first place comes the family, instituted directly by God for its peculiar purpose, the generation and formation of offspring; for this reason it has priority of nature and therefore of rights over civil society. Nevertheless, the family is an imperfect society, since it has not in itself all the means for its own complete development; whereas civil society is a perfect society, having in itself all the means for its peculiar end, which is the temporal well-being of the community; and so, in this respect, that is, in view of the common good, it has pre-eminence over the family, which finds its own suitable temporal perfection precisely in civil society.⁵

Pius XI thus teaches that, while the family is the foundation of society, it is not perfect through itself. The family cannot attain even its natural ends (goods) without the assistance of a broader community. Accordingly, Pius XI teaches us that the civil society, with its care for the higher common good, is necessary for the family to reach its perfection.

This brings us to the third, and most excellent perfect society, the Church.

The third society, into which man is born when through Baptism he reaches the divine life of grace, is the Church; a society of the supernatural order and of universal extent; a perfect society, because it has in itself all the means required for its own end, which is the eternal salvation of mankind; hence it is supreme in its own domain.⁶

Pius does not teach here that the Church is perfect with respect to our natural goods. We need civil society because there are natural ends (goods) to which we are ordered but which the Church does not supply; the Church is perfect with respect to her own end: the eternal salvation of mankind.

Consequently, education which is concerned with man as a whole, individually and socially, in the order of nature and in the order of grace, necessarily belongs to all these three societies, in due proportion, corresponding, according to the disposition of Divine Providence, to the co-ordination of their respecting ends.⁷

Parents who contain their children within the family alone for their education remove them from the “larger society” that town and church provide for that education and are, in a sense, depriving their children of certain “perfections” that belong to the fuller participation in the other societies. This is not an attack on homeschoolers; it is simply an acknowledgement that homeschooling of itself is not ordered to a proper position within the broader society. In principle, homeschooling cuts young people off from the community and an important means of participating in the common good of that community.

There is an education that belongs to all three societies. By nature, the education in the family is primary, since it is the first society. It is also the case, however, that the proper education within the family is not perfect. There is another education that belongs to the second and third societies. Families that take these on as belonging to their proper education may do so, and even do them well, but it does not properly, and certainly not ideally, belong to the family to take on the education proper to the other two societies.

In reflecting on the importance of schools, Dr. Daniel Guernsey of the Cardinal Newman Society argues that “Catholic youth are destined to serve the Church, and attending faithful Catholic schools and universities is a powerful way both to encounter and to serve the Church, even while young.”⁸ It is simply false to think that homeschooling can adequately allow the perfections of the natural and supernatural society to fully educate a child as a school does; it is erroneous to claim that we best fulfill our canonical mandate to assist in the maintenance of Catholic schools by withholding our children from them without just cause.⁹

Role Models and Authority Figures

In its 1977 document, “The Catholic School,” Sacred Congregation for Catholic Education writes that “the extent to which the Christian message is transmitted through education depends to a very great extent on the teachers. The integration of culture and faith is mediated by the other integration of faith and life in the person of the teacher. The nobility of the task to which teachers are called demands that, in imitation of Christ, the only Teacher, they reveal the Christian message not only by word but also by every gesture of their behavior.”¹⁰ This passage highlights the mimetic dimension of Catholic teaching. Children need role models, and, especially as adolescence sets in, they need models outside of the family to lead them into the world.

Even for younger children, the problem of relating to Mom or Dad as both parent and official teacher can be confusing. After all, schools provide authority figures who represent, in a sense, the “real world” for children. As we saw in the Pius XI passage, the family is an imperfect society; parents cannot be the sole means through which children are led into the larger, more perfect, society. Furthermore, since, according to the Council and canon law, “true education must strive for complete formation of the human person that looks to his or her final end as well as to the common good of societies,”¹¹ young people must encounter authority figures outside of the family (the imperfect society) and learn to engage with the life of the broader societies. It is simply not plausible to think that homeschooling can be conducive to engaging with authorities beyond their parents.

In addition to providing models and authority figures, there is an additional benefit to a child’s education from attendance at a Catholic school and the encounter with competent and knowledgeable teachers. When a “different set of eyes” works with students outside of the home environment in the context of a school, that teacher is often able to see patterns emerge in a child that parents would be incapable of seeing in their own child. A child can be monitored in relation to other children in the classroom as well as other children the teacher has worked with over the years. Evaluating the relative patterns of behavior, a teacher can provide general information about a student’s needs in all sorts of areas (social, academic, physical and even moral). This perspective is nearly impossible for a parent to achieve; a teacher is often the saving grace in a child’s education when he/she can help parents see what they would never see on their own.

Peer Group

For many homeschoolers, it seems, the problem of the peer group is an essential factor in keeping them from school. Not wanting their children influenced by bad models is the key. This concern is understandable if the “cool kids” in school are lawbreakers, godless, or hostile to learning in general. What do parents do when the students at a given school are morally corrupt? Listen to Shane Schaetzel, an apologist for homeschooling:

Many Christian parents, both Evangelicals and Catholics, worry about the bad influence of curriculum and teachers in public schools. However, that’s probably only about 10% of the problem. The other 90% of the problem is student peers. Most of the troubles that students get into involve other students, and if there’s going to be any lifelong damage (rebellion, parties, sex, alcohol, drugs, homosexuality, gender-bending, etc.) it usually comes from the influence of other students, not faculty or curriculum. When you send your child to a brick & mortar school, you’re sending them into a menagerie of rebellion, perversion and peer pressure. All the problems other kids have at home, come to school with them. Your son or daughter gets to navigate through them all. Remove them from the brick & mortar school, and you will have removed them from 90% of the problems facing youth today. You can figure out, on your own, how to handle the other 10% of the problems.¹²

Although Schaetzel cannot be said to speak for all homeschoolers, his 90/10 percentage split is eye-opening. The heart of the problem (for him at least) is whether his children should be around peer groups that make bad choices and model illicit desires.

The Church is eminently aware of the power of peers to lead and entice the young into malevolent ways. Book II of St. Augustine’s Confessions is our most enduring insight into this phenomenon. The 16-year-old Augustine was swept away by peer pressure to steal fruit (from a pear tree, according to his memory):

Yet by myself alone I would not have done it — I recall what my heart was — alone I could not have done it. I loved, then, in it the companionship of my accomplices with whom I did it. I did not, therefore, love the theft alone — yea, rather, it was that alone that I loved, for the companionship was nothing. What is the fact? Who is it that can teach me, but He who illuminates mine heart and searches out the dark corners thereof? What is it that has come into my mind to inquire about, to discuss, and to reflect upon? For had I at that time loved the pears I stole, and wished to enjoy them, I might have done so alone, if I could have been satisfied with the mere commission of the theft by which my pleasure was secured; nor needed I have provoked that itching of my own passions, by the encouragement of accomplices. But as my enjoyment was not in those pears, it was in the crime itself, which the company of my fellow-sinners produced.¹³

It was clearly NOT pear pressure; no, it was peer pressure, and he was seduced through imitation of the desires of his teenage group to sin.¹⁴ Shouldn’t we keep our children from such bad peers?

Although this pro-homeschool position seems to be one which would occur frequently and, thus, warrant frequent removal of students from schools, we argue that this position is almost always a misguided one. Moreover, in misunderstanding the dynamics at work in this situation, homeschoolers such as Schaetzel run the risk of failing to provide the best education for their children possible.

At the heart of the problem is one of mimetic formation of children. Schaetzel’s fears are identical to those expressed by Jean-Jacques Rousseau in his landmark pedagogical text, Emile. In this text, Rousseau envisions a perfect childhood education with one and only one tutor and no fellow students. Moreover, the tutor’s role is largely to “disappear” and let the child learn through encounter with nature . . . alone. Rousseau lays the seeds for every rotten form of pedagogical naturalism (strongly condemned by Pius XI)¹⁵ that will develop from his time forward. Almost certainly rejecting original sin outright, Rousseau also rejects the goodness of imitation. Ultimately, he says, Emile will not imitate; he will learn a radical independence.¹⁶ degenerates into vice.” The anti-mimetic is ultimately anti-social in Rousseau’s thought.] And though a contemporary faithful Catholic parent who fully respects the teaching of original sin is not directly complicit in pedagogical naturalism, the fear of bad mimesis can echo this type of Romanticism and run afoul of proper education; we might even effect naturalism-in-action though in our words we remain faithful to the teachings of the Church.

The Church sees education as ordered to a kind of freedom that is liberated from dangerous mimetic influences: bad “conditioning” from the world or, by extension, temptations from one’s peers. Listen to the Church describe the proper formation of the young: “rapport with the students ought to be a prudent combination of familiarity and distance; and this must be adapted to the need of each individual student. Familiarity will make a personal relationship easier, but a certain distance is also needed: students need to learn how to express their own personality without being pre-conditioned; they need to be freed from inhibitions in the responsible exercise of their freedom.”¹⁷ More directly: “It must never be forgotten that the purpose of instruction at school is education, that is, the development of man from within, freeing him from that conditioning which would prevent him from becoming a fully integrated human being.”¹⁸

What is at stake in the dialogue between Rousseau and the Church is whether or not one can free oneself from negative mimetic influences without positive role models. Ultimately Rousseau believes in a human nature denuded of its mimetic necessities. The Church, however, points man toward a more and more radical transformation of himself in Christ. As John Paul II would say: “The man who wishes to understand himself thoroughly-and not just in accordance with immediate, partial, often superficial, and even illusory standards and measures of his being-he must with his unrest, uncertainty and even his weakness and sinfulness, with his life and death, draw near to Christ. He must, so to speak, enter into him with all his own self, he must “‘appropriate’ and assimilate the whole of the reality of the Incarnation and Redemption in order to find himself.”¹⁹ Clearly the Catholic Church sees lifelong imitation as a necessity and proclaims that only when it is in Christ can that life be to the fullest. The secret to overcoming peer pressure is to follow Christ in the Holy Spirit as well as in and through role models who witness Christ.

How do children and adolescents learn to follow Christ best? How do they encounter Christ best: in a Catholic school or in the home school? In order to see why the “brick and mortar” school is usually better served for this purpose than the home, one needs to see that to encounter Christ in others, we need to have the supernatural insight that distinguishes Christ from the person. A set of external figures can best allow this to take place, for we can with many examples better abstract the real Christ from redeemed sinner who stands before us. After all, in order to “see” Christ in others, we also must be able to see the general effects of sin and the general face of human nature in others. These general patterns only emerge when we encounter multiple people, and this is the proper function of the Catholic School.

Moreover, especially in key moments of vocational discernment (some of which can happen in adolescence or even childhood), it is important for young people to have multiple possible guides, as the Lord often has a special one in mind for each person. Returning to our original narrative of Aquinas, we realize that, if St. Thomas’s parents had had their way, their son would have become a Benedictine monk. Thanks to proper Catholic schooling, he found the Dominicans, and his true path to sainthood — and the holy intellectual life — was discovered.

But why can’t parents do this? Isn’t it better if Johnny and Susie stay away from difficult peer groups and learn on their own? Parents must understand that their role is to educate as parents, not as science teachers, math teachers, and so on. As we have seen from Pius XI, parents as primary educators cannot fulfill what is necessary for the secondary society. Moreover, they must understand that, especially in adolescence, a great movement toward “adult emancipation” begins, and a child then needs new role models to guide that transformation.

This is the ultimate lesson of Augustine’s Confessions. St. Monica can do many things with her maternal care and prayer . . . but she can never be the model that leads Augustine out of heresy into the fullness of the Catholic faith. He needs those detailed in Book VIII: Simplicianus, who tells of the noble conversion of Victorinus; Ponticianus, who heralds the life of St. Antony; Lady Continence, who holds up countless models of virtue; and, after the mystical voice “tolle lege,” St. Paul, who inspires Augustine to “put on the Lord Jesus Christ.” Only then can he begin to return again to the world of peers with a freedom from bad mimesis.

Homeschooling a child to keep him/her from the world is well-intentioned but misguided. But the very worst reason to homeschool is pride. A parent can be overcome with pride and a selfishness that sees his or her role as primary educator to mean “best educator” or “only educator.” This type of self-exaltation can have devastating effects on a child both by depriving him/her of the necessary formation for society and also by modeling for him/her the face of self-exaltation and self-love. As parents, we must always be aware that we are not enough for our children.

While parents are the primary educators as role models in the faith and virtuous living, their primary role of education is also in helping their children work with authority figures and peers. Keeping them away from dangerous people is certainly part of their role, but keeping them away from difficult situations is not. Parents need to understand that, in helping their children work with difficult peers and challenging school situations, they are teaching their children key lessons for how to live and sanctify the world. Catholic schools provide peer groups that allow young people to cooperate, compete, and connect; they are sanctified by and sanctify others in their formation of collegial relationships and even friendships. Even in the face of very challenging peer situations (like bullying or grave immorality), young people – with the guidance of a school and the proper formation from parents — can learn to navigate the complexities of this fallen world so that they may become saints. We deceive ourselves if we think we help our children by isolating them from difficulties or challenges. Finally, this is contrary to the meaning of Catholic education

The Necessary Homeschooler

What if there is no good Catholic school around? Or, for that matter, what if a parent is convinced that a given Catholic school lacks proper teaching on faith and morals or is, for all intents and purposes, incompetent in educating? John Paul II saw this problem and wrote, in Familiaris consortio, that “if ideologies opposed to the Christian faith are taught in the schools, the family must join with other families, if possible through family associations, and with all its strength and with wisdom help the young not to depart from the faith.”²⁰ Note here, though, that even though this seems to be a full endorsement of homeschooling, it is already asking families to come together with other families and, “if possible,” family associations. The principle of the larger society is clearly affirmed as a higher good than the homeschool. Indeed, the paragraph begins with the claim that “the family is the primary but not the only and exclusive educating community.” For those intent on making “primary educator” mean “exclusive educator,” this passage should give them pause.

The movement, then, should always be towards a more concrete social and civic school, and, for Catholics, a Catholic school. The first goal should be to help one’s diocesan school become better. In the case of poor elements there, parents should strive to build independent Catholic schools. We hope that it goes without saying that a homeschool distance learning with internet classes is a horrible substitute and one that runs the risk of actually not providing an authentic Catholic education at all.²¹

Some homeschoolers stop at the homeschool co-operative (co-op). Is this enough? Perhaps we begin “splitting hairs” arguing for a Catholic school over a co-op when the latter can be very close in structure to a Catholic school. However, a return to the four principles described in this essay shows that the co-op is not the endgame . . . is not the ideal. The co-op will never achieve the density of experienced teachers, ones who are hired for having developed their vocation and craft around this or that subject or age-level of pedagogy that a Catholic school can. At best, perhaps a co-op could pull in an expert or two to teach some classes for the group, but this will still lack the instructional expertise that veteran teachers would have, and no co-op comes close to fostering the relationship between teachers and students and community that a good Catholic school offers. Furthermore, the co-op cannot achieve the full ecclesial belonging in the sense described in this article; it thus lacks a full engagement with the common good. And, whereas the co-op can offer some role models and peer groups with the inter-familial cooperatives, it does not have the depth of structure to make these encounters with authority and colleagues ones that reflect the “real world” in the same way that an official “school” allows. Thus, homeschoolers should always be “in a state of journeying” toward finding a real Catholic school for their child. Homeschooling is not the ideal.

Conclusion

The Church was saved, in a sense, by the Common Doctor, because of the Benedictines who educated the young Thomas Aquinas, the Dominicans who fed his need for spiritual growth, and the universities that took his Medieval “K-12 formation” to the level of theological master. Although the Catholic school in our own time may not always be able to produce the next Angelic Doctor, it still remains the goal for which we should aspire. We must take canon law to heart and build and maintain great Catholic schools,²² not just for the Church but also for our own children.