School’s out - Modern conventional schooling is an aberration, says Anthony Radice

There are compelling arguments in favour of considering alternatives to conventional schooling. Catholic parents increasingly recognise that the morality of those who teach their children in schools, including those labelled “Catholic”, is sometimes opposed to the perennial teaching of the Church. But it is not just about the teachers. Parents are also rightly concerned about the company their children keep. Children naturally wish to be normal and to fit in with others in a school, and what is considered normal in our modern world is fundamentally opposed to Catholic faith and morals. This danger is hugely aggravated by the ubiquitous presence of smartphones, which open up a world of evil that was unimaginable for previous generations. A further threat to children’s faith and morals lies in the school curriculum, especially given the relentless advance of the woke agenda.

Based on all these dangers, it is easy to see why some parents concerned about their children’s eternal salvation choose to educate them outside conventional schools. But home education must not be seen as nothing more than an emergency measure to protect our children from evil influences, a sort of hunkering down in the bunker in a post-apocalyptic world, where we try desperately to survive amidst the rubble of what was once Western civilization.

Home education is not just about hiding away and protecting our children from moral poison, important though that is. Education within the family is a positive good, not a secondbest option. As a part of the natural order, the family is a society designed by God for the purpose of bringing children into the world and educating them. Parents are given grace through the Sacrament of Matrimony to achieve these ends, for God never gives us a mission without also giving us the means to accomplish it.

In a Catholic home-educating family, children have access to many rich means of learning in the most natural way possible: from their parents and from their brothers and sisters. They are not locked into an artificially created group, segregated by age. They can have conversations with those who are older and wiser. Ironically, given the monstrously high cost of paying so many professionals to teach children in schools, a home-educated child gets far more input from adults than they ever could in a school environment, where the one-to-one attention available for each pupil is typically close to zero. to books, home-educating parents can make use of Catholic programmes and tutors from across the world. A wealth of material and a huge number of options are available to them, especially with the rise of online tutoring and platforms such as Outschool. Many families make use of full home education programmes such as Our Lady of Victory School or Mother of Divine Grace, thus ensuring that their children’s education is integrally Catholic, not just a bog-standard curriculum with some catechesis bolted on.

In a Catholic home-educating family, children and their parents can pray together; they can sing together; they can garden together; they can go for walks in the countryside together. It is true that these things could happen outside school hours, but will they? School swallows an obscene proportion of the waking hours of children, especially when homework is set on top of all the hours spent travelling to and from an institution that demands fulltime attendance.

It may be objected that a family is not a perfect society, that it lacks the means to achieve by itself everything necessary to its God-given goal. This is undoubtedly true, but then homeeducating parents do not treat it as one. It is a rather ridiculous straw man to claim they do, because everyone who has even bought a single book for their children has acknowledged they do not have all the means within their family to achieve a perfect education. In addition

At the end of the day, we need to ask ourselves why the modern system of schooling was created, and by whom. It was developed during the nineteenth and twentieth century by secular governments, with the goal of creating loyal, conformist citizens. Unfortunately, as with many other inventions of the modern secular powers, it has been imitated by churchmen, often to the detriment of Catholic faith and morals. These days it is not suited to the goal of creating saints. If we want to find models of education that have that as their goal, we need to look much further back, back to the golden age of Christendom, and more fundamentally, to the Holy Family itself. If we want to rebuild Christendom, we must begin within our families.

The writer is a home-educating father of seven with many years’ experience teaching in schools, who switched to working as a freelance teacher online in 2021.