Education must be controlled by a child’s parents

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 her only or even her best course today is to educate through schools that are simply Catholic versions of the public norms.

Relatives and friends

In the 18th and 19th centuries, the Irish often educated their children through illegal arrangements called “hedge schools”, which were located in hedges, ditches, or more often in cabins, houses or barns, and which taught the three Rs and often also Latin and Greek. The parents involved understood that Catholic education was illegal (just as it is disadvantaged by the State in many countries today), and they also understood that they were the primary educators of their children. But then as now, for such home-grown efforts to work, help must come not only from the increasingly beleaguered Catholic Church but also from the relatives and friends of the parents.

In the regions of the United States in which home-schooling is thriving, there are ever-growing opportunities for what I have been calling cooperative schooling, by which I mean relatively small academic initiatives designed to teach specific subjects, provide common activities for the students, and/or help parents to get the right materials and effective methods for keeping the education of their children on track. But such efforts are mostly in their infancy. Moreover, families with lesser resources and/or two working parents will find it far more difficult to choose this path for the education of their children. This is where parish and diocesan help in various forms can be invaluable, by offering facilities as needed and by providing guidance and even some financial support.

But this is also where the relatives and friends of those with larger numbers of children can look for ways to be helpful, in everything from financial to actual educational assistance, and definitely not excluding vital levels of moral and spiritual support. It is easier, of course, to drop our children off at what we now think of as traditional schools. But we ought to remember that until the nineteenth century, the vast majority of children were not educated in what we now consider “traditional” schools, and yet intelligence was still on display and children were still able to grow up into well-formed and knowledgeable adults, well-equipped to play productive roles in the social orders in which they found themselves.

A massive, bureaucratized “educational system” is not necessary to any society. It could even be argued that such a system does more harm than good. In fact that is exactly the point I am making here. Parents must be the primary educators of their children. It is up to the Church and, by extension, all the rest of us, to help make that possible once again today. We must never forget that there is something akin to hunger, thirst, rejection, nakedness, sickness, and imprisonment in the life of the mind and of the soul. Surely our response to such suffering must be clear and generous. For in the end, we know very well what the King will say: “Truly, as you did not do it to one of one of the least of these, you did not do it to me” (cf. Mt 25:31-46).

And those who failed to help will go away into eternal punishment, but the righteous into eternal life.

---

---

* 3. The Authors of Education [extract from Vatican II’s Declaration on Christian Education]

Since parents have given children their life, they are bound by the most serious obligation to educate their offspring and therefore must be recognized as the primary and principal educators.11 This role in education is so important that only with difficulty can it be supplied where it is lacking. Parents are the ones who must create a family atmosphere animated by love and respect for God and man, in which the well-rounded personal and social education of children is fostered. Hence the family is the first school of the social virtues that every society needs. It is particularly in the Christian family, enriched by the grace and office of the sacrament of matrimony, that children should be taught from their early years to have a knowledge of God according to the faith received in Baptism, to worship Him, and to love their neighbor. Here, too, they find their first experience of a wholesome human society and of the Church. Finally, it is through the family that they are gradually led to a companionship with their fellowmen and with the people of God. Let parents, then, recognize the inestimable importance a truly Christian family has for the life and progress of God’s own people.¹²

The family which has the primary duty of imparting education needs help of the whole community. In addition therefore, to the rights of parents and others to whom the parents entrust a share in the work of education, certain rights and duties belong indeed to civil society, whose role is to direct what is required for the common temporal good. Its function is to promote the education of youth in many ways, namely: to protect the duties and rights of parents and others who share in education and to give them aid; according to the principle of subsidiarity, when the endeavors of parents and other societies are lacking, to carry out the work of education in accordance with the wishes of the parents; and, moreover, as the common good demands, to build schools and institutions.¹³

Finally, in a special way, the duty of educating belongs to the Church, not merely because she must be recognized as a human society capable of educating, but especially because she has the responsibility of announcing the way of salvation to all men, of communicating the life of Christ to those who believe, and, in her unfailing solicitude, of assisting men to be able to come to the fullness of this life.14 The Church is bound as a mother to give to these children of hers an education by which their whole life can be imbued with the spirit of Christ and at the same time do all she can to promote for all peoples the complete perfection of the human person, the good of earthly society and the building of a world that is more human.¹⁵