How do we know that homeschooling is necessary? First, we know it from divine revelation. The early Church is normative not only on what we should believe as Catholics but on how we ought to learn our faith...and live it. There were not established Catholic schools in the Roman Empire back in the first 300 years of the Church's history. Except for parents becoming, believing, and being heroic Catholics in the early Church, nothing would have happened. The Church would have died out before the end of the first century.
There is no single aspect of religious instruction that, over the centuries, the Church has not more frequently, or more consistently, taught the faithful, than of the parents on how to provide for the religious and, therefore, also human education and upbringing of their offspring. So true is this that it is the second and coequal purpose for Christ instituting the Sacrament of Matrimony -- for the procreation and the education of children.
By whom? By the parents! That is why Christ instituted the Sacrament of Matrimony. So how do we know that homeschooling is necessary? Because the Church has always taught it.
Where has the Church survived? Only and wherever -- and this is historically provable -- homeschooling over the centuries by the Catholic parents has been taken so seriously that they considered it their most sacred duty, after having brought the children into the world physically, to parent them spiritually.
The necessity for homeschooling is not only a natural necessity; it is a supernatural necessity. Have parents over the centuries, in all nations, from the dawn of human history, in every culture, had the obligation to teach and train their children? Yes, the same ones who brought the children physically into the word have a natural obligation binding in the natural law, to provide for the mental, moral, and social upbringing of their offspring. Yet since God became man, the necessity, and therefore the corresponding obligation, becomes supernatural.
What do we mean when we say that Catholic homeschooling is a supernatural necessity? We mean that in God's mysterious but infallible providence, He channels His grace from human beings who already possess that grace. It is a platitude to say that we cannot give what we do not have. Nobody would ever learn the alphabet. We would not know how to read or write...or even how to eat.
We have to be taught everything we know. The real necessity for Catholic homeschooling is neither because we naturally need someone else to bring us into the world, nor to teach us what we need to know and do as human beings. Since the coming of Christ, we are not longer mere human beings.
At baptism, we receive the life which is the very life of God shared by Him with His creatures. And just as no one gives himself natural life, so no one receives or nurtures or develops or grows in that supernatural life that we receive at baptism.
Excerpted from a speech originally given by Fr. John Hardon, S. J. at a home school seminar in Oct. 1991, St. Paul, MN. Please take the time to read the entire excerpt here
- Father John Hardon, S.J.
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