The cost of deferring to others. . .

For a very long time now and evolving only slowly over that time the family began to defer more and more to others.  This is especially true of education as the family receded while the role of the state and its institutions of public education took over raising our children.  While there were times in history when this was an easier and symbiotic partnership, it has increasingly become a more challenging relationship.  

For the family side of things, it has not all been sunshine and roses.  The rise of the single parent family has presenting a significant challenge to the publish school teacher and classroom, enrolling children who now come without the requisite background and preparation the home once offered.  The growing dysfunction within nearly all the homes and the loss of a multi-generational context have left the school to try and parent and socialize as well as teach.  The loss of any real moral consensus in America has left the educational endeavor without a direction and without a clear foundation on which to build.  The pressure upon schools to serve as incubators of current societal and educational thinking has left less time for for more core educational pursuits and changed the way schools are evaluated.  The view of the school by the community from treasure to drag or financial burden has moved to the many new homes without children or grandchildren and introduced new stress points to the whole task.  The rise of vocational education in which success is viewed neither as knowledge nor the ability to think but readiness for the job market has also produced cracks in the once impenetrable wall of primary and secondary education.

For that matter, the educational industry in America has grown increasingly distant from those who have the children and those who tax dollars pay the freight.  The rift is more than mere competition but suspicion and distrust of those institutions once proudly among the most revered in America.  This has created resentment and antagonism between the teaching enterprise and those who are taught -- along with their family constituents.  The educational industry has always skewed more left of center everywhere but this is pronounced at the university level and in urban settings.  The rights of the child in the classroom are championed over and against the rights of parents, family, and home.  All of this is  happening amid a growing number of alternatives and choices in the marketplace of options -- including home schooling.  While religious schools are not yet dead, they are no longer as vibrant or secure as the home schooling option increases even though religion is hardly the sole or even more important reason for families to make this choice for their children.  Classical schools hold a promise that is attracting people from all economic classes and from every social background.  For that matter, home schooled kids have shown their stuff and proven to be exceptionally prepared and profoundly successful.  All of this raises the question of whether dollars thrown at the problem will solve anything and might the cheapest option (in real dollars) be better than the expensive one.

Another aspect of this deference of family to school reveals the struggle of the home to present to their children a cohesive worldview, solid moral values which can endure over a lifetime, religious foundation to keep the kids in the faith, and a perspective on the world which, though challenged in teen age years is usually found again as those kids marry and have their own children.  The Church has also been complicit in this.  Sunday school was an American invention for the sake of those children whose parents were not in the Church and yet it has become a population nearly exclusively for those whose parents do.  In the same way, catechetical instruction was done in the home and examination at the Church but now that is largely the domain of the professionals.  How is this working?  Sadly, even worse than the success of the public school over against the home based educational programs.  Yet in the Church we continue to be tempted to mirror in our own schools the modern trends and ideas of the public school and to promote diversity as a sacred truth to accompany the Gospel itself.  We in the Church have learned to be both suspicious and unsure about the value of religious instruction over all and especially that which is done in the congregation by a professional teacher of doctrine.  All of this has accompanied the increased statistics of those lost to the faith in early childhood or immediately post-confirmation.  We say we are not competing with the home and family but it sure sounds like we are saying that professionals know better than parents.  If that is not what we want to say, then it might be time to change our stock speech.  Maybe we need to help the family and home more than compete with them or push them out of the equation.  Home schooling may prove to be the way to do both and versions of home school with co-ops or other partnered endeavors with the Church may be even more important going forward than actual brick and mortar religious schools.

The point is this.  There is a cost to deferring to others what is the rightful domain of the family and the home.  It is high time we recognized this and admitted it.