A Leaven In The World… Parents Are The First And Best Teachers
By FR. KEVIN M. CUSICK
The option to home-school is the overwhelming trend among our traditional Catholic families. Why?
They want to have larger families if able, usually more than the social minimum of two or three, out of a deep adherence to the faith and its integral practice.
Tuition at Catholic schools is increasingly prohibitive under the budgetary strain of large payroll burdens. Religious women living community life and vows of poverty are largely out of the education business and lay teachers have taken their place. Fair wages and insurance are in accord with Catholic teaching and they are not ungenerous.
Home-schooling is a lessened drain on the family budget, which is definitely a draw. But there’s more. Take a look at the results of Catholic home-schooling versus institutional Catholic schools.
Three children go through Catholic schools from elementary level through high school, one of them all the way through a Jesuit university. None of these three now consistently practice the faith. All three embrace the moral evil of the homosexual agenda, with its accompanying drive to redefine marriage, and abortion. That is, they completely reject integral Catholic teaching.
Six children, on the other hand, are home-schooled up to eighth grade, after which attending conventional Catholic high schools. All now practice and assent to the tenets of the Catholic faith. The two oldest are now “productive” citizens, one active-duty military and the other a health professional who is preparing to marry another practicing Catholic next spring.
From a purely worldly calculus, home-schooling wins: The non-home-schooled children live beyond their means and rack up debts to go to “brand-name” schools, while the home-schooled individuals use less expensive alternatives and successfully find employment afterward, rather than aimlessly traveling the world, racking up debt.
What made the difference in the radically opposed outcome of these children of siblings who were raised within a practicing Catholic family? Early formation through home-schooling that preserved and underscored the primary influence of the parents and the Catholic faith.
Studies affirm that the influence of the parents is diminished and even eclipsed as soon as the children start attending conventional schools of any kind.
Of course, Catholic schools are somewhat able to mitigate the corrosive effects of a hostile society. Institutions beyond the horizon of the family are inherently weaker in fighting the battle for the faith, however. The responsibility for each child is diffused when the parents delegate to others some aspects of their role as first teachers.
Assuming that a child gets all the faith instruction he or she needs in the classroom alone is always dangerous. The pagan cultural tsunami has overwhelmed the lay Catholic teacher in the classroom who feels powerless under its onslaught. A child declare she’s “gay” or trapped in the wrong body and immediately upturns the classroom and destabilizes the status quo equilibrium, forcing a teacher and parents to react. Or not.
Children are not equipped to integrate impure or sexual language in the classroom due to their age and developmental differences. It is never appropriate.
But how to react? The child who acts out is himself or herself a victim in some ways of a pagan or diabolical agenda to which they’ve been exposed in the home. The teacher or administrator has no power beyond the classroom. The child needs compassion and help.
Many families who use Catholic schools do not attend Mass on Sundays or subscribe to the faith. They are not required to. Thus the atmosphere in the school is ever vulnerable to malign forces.
Sometimes by the extreme response of withdrawing their children from the school, parents reassert influence. This option can induce panic, especially for those brainwashed into thinking proper socialization means corralling children with others of the same age for a certain number of hours each day.
There is no proven principle that establishes children must be educated in this manner. It’s just that it is easier to impart the same information simultaneously to a large group of children.
But the fact of the matter is that each child is at a different developmental stage. This is true for sexuality as well and the reason why the Church teaches that physiological sex education in a group context is neither appropriate nor necessary.
Our schools are fighting a rear guard action along with our Church against the cultural forces of sexual revolution working to tear the roots of marriage and the family from their holy origin in God.
Schools are mostly defenseless against the plan to spread compromise to all institutions. This is an effort to enlist them in the war to invert God’s will for families into a diabolical mockery of husband and wife, man and woman, and the children with whom God may bless them as they become one flesh in the marital act.
Nothing else is or can be marriage. Faithful Catholics who believe and teach this are increasingly marginalized in all institutions, including increasing numbers of Catholic parishes and schools.
The bigger parishes with more staff are especially vulnerable to this phenomenon of systematic de-Christianization.
Against the social onslaught, the individual student, teacher, or administrator is trapped in defensive mode.
The typical Catholic teacher is unprepared to respond except perhaps emotionally to the random child who acts out according to the “gay” or “trans” agenda, effectively sabotaging the institution.
Cases of firings of Catholic teachers who are discovered to have “married” a person of the same sex underscore the reactive nature of the institutions, including schools, to the powerful gay lobby and its agents. Individual teachers who are trying to protect their jobs are unprepared to go to the mat for Catholic moral teaching.
Vicious attacks of a personal nature against priests and bishops on social and other media after the firing of employees in same-sex marital simulations are an inducement to go along and get along when a fifth-grade student, for example, says he or she is “gay.”
Children’s purity and faith can survive conventional schools, but is the exorbitant expense worth it?
Parents are the first educators, including in the faith, which is first in importance. The fact remains that the teacher in the classroom is not going to defend the children with the same energy and urgency as would the child’s own parents.
Parents who home-school have the most powerful weapon to save the souls of their children: Their own prayerful and faithful example and influence without contradictory and scandalous opposition from outside the home.
A recent graduate of home-schooling through high school successfully matriculated to a faithful Catholic college and is doing just fine. One more win for home-schooling. But much more important for the Lord: One more faithful Catholic soul has successfully transitioned to the first steps of mature adult faith in the world beyond the home.
We can only hope and pray that the growing Catholic home-school movement will soon refill our Sunday pews with souls on the way to Heaven.
Thank you for reading and praised be Jesus Christ, now and forever. On Twitter @IntroiboAdAltar and blog APriestLife.blogspot.com.
