Home and School in American Catholic Life | Joseph T. Stuart | Homiletic & Pastoral Review
The Church in America needs both homeschooling, and Catholic schools. Homeschooling provides a bold reminder to priests, bishops, and government leaders that parents are the first educators of their children.
The education of children within the home is booming nationwide. In Bismarck, North Dakota, where I live, over one hundred families participate in the local homeschool group (there are more, besides) even as private schools, both Protestant and Catholic, thrive. Often homeschool and Catholic school families attend the same parishes, and know each other, but sometimes there is little interaction, and even less mutual understanding, between them. Catholic schools are condemned as not Catholic enough, and homeschooling is attacked because everyone knows of a family in which the “schooling” left much to be desired. This essay argues that understanding the historical reasons why Catholic schools and, later, homeschooling arose to help one to see how both can contribute to the revitalization of a Catholic subculture and an American society in complementary ways.
Those historical reasons clustered around an antagonistic relationship between home and school that developed in the past. In the 19th century, Catholics resisted Protestant control of public education, giving rise to their own system. In the 20th century, home and school could be increasingly at odds because of changes in American civil religion that inhibited the transmission of Christian faith. In addition, some families came to see education in consolidated schools far removed from the home as damaging to domestic life. I will argue that this dual history of shifting relationships, between home and school, points to important principles for religious and social renewal in 21st century America: Catholic schools can provide a base for flourishing Catholic subcultures and evangelization, while homeschooling can enrich domestic culture, and function as a “check and balance” on schools to remain true to their mission of educating the whole person. In turn, flourishing homes and schools encourage that subsidiarity of rightly-ordered power structures helping to check the spread of politics into social life.
The Rise of Antagonism
While laws in the colonial era requiring parental home education of children eventually disappeared, the lives of pre-industrial Americans continued by necessity to revolve around their homes for generations.
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