The Blessings of Catholic Home Schooling by Fr. Constantine
The first blessing of Catholic Home Schooling is the most obvious: being at home with your children. What does this mean? First, it means that you spend that most priceless of all commodities upon them: time. The person who will have the greatest effect upon a growing child is the person who spends the most time with him. Keeping the children at home can mean that you have enough time to communicate to them your Faith, your values, your expectations, your appreciation—your love—rather than trusting others who have proven over the past forty years to have been so very unworthy of that trust.
With your children at home you can open up to them the wonders, joys and safety of the truly Catholic way of living. You can opt out of the secular way of keeping time and keep time as the Church does, celebrating the Mysteries of the Faith and its heroes, with appropriate times off to anchor that joy of a “feast” in the sense that only ethnic American Catholics of the past infrequently experienced. The joys of vacation, of special “feast” foods learned and cooked in the “home economics” class. Of course, in North America, the experience that we have of Christmas is something of a pale reminder of what a true feast is, although Christmas is deeply flawed by commercialism. Still the atmosphere of feast that is generated by wreaths, carols, candles and Christmas trees could easily be extended to Easter, Pentecost and Our Lady’s Assumption in August and her apparition at Guadalupe in December. In the Byzantine tradition, we have an icon of the feast that pictures the relevant facts of Sacred Scripture or the story of the saint in a perfectly obvious and beautiful way.
One of the most outstanding concerns of the general public with regard to home schooling is the issue of socialization: the making of friends and the nurturing of friendships. However, a very serious aspect of this issue is, “What kind of friends do you want your children to have?” Our contemporary society does not produce good companions as a general rule and peer pressure is a very significant factor in the degradation of American and worldwide youth culture, which, in many cases, is nothing less than a throwback to out and out barbarism of the crudest kind. It has always been a principle of Christian life that friends are very important and so they should be chosen carefully. Friends should be good people who will have the best possible effect upon the young. Home schooling allows parents to have more of a say in the type of friends that their children will have. There are those who object that this is a “hothouse mentality” and an improper way to raise children. Again, however, when it is pouring rain and hail outside, a good hothouse is a much better place to raise flowers than the garden outside. To those who object that we are not raising flowers, I would respond, “Take a closer look.” One of the singular graces of home schooling is the possibility of preserving innocence and not just the teaching of repentance. Let a child take on the world after he or she is formed in the truth.
Strategic withdrawal from the corruption of general society is not necessarily a flight or an escape from “reality”. As human beings we are supposed to shape reality and not just submit to it, especially if it is objectionable. The “reality” in the general “outside” world is tremendously skewed. It is upside down. Just for starters, men as such are derided, treated contemptuously as well as immorally. Yet, we in Catholic home schooling are discovering that man, especially as husband and father, is the very image of God in the home. Our children must either recover from that or build upon it. Even if Dad is completely out of the picture, there are ineluctable consequences we cannot avoid. With home schooling the natural, normal order of reality can be maintained without the constant intrusion, interference and contradiction of the outside world. In a home schooling atmosphere both father and mother may demonstrate to their children God’s paradigm for the happy home that is also holy.
Content taken from the November 2004 Seton Home Study School Newsletter.