Saturday, July 3, 2010
The Case for Catholic Schools (Part Six): Exercising Religious Liberty
[This is the last in a series. The full series may be found here.]
Since the Catholic immigration to the United States began in numbers in the middle to late Nineteenth Century, religious liberty and Catholic schools have been intertwined in American history.
Beginning with the Supreme Court’s 1925 decision in Pierce v. Society of Sisters, which affirmed the right of parents to choose faith-based education for their children over the state’s attempt to force all children into government-run schools, and continuing through the 2002 decision in Zelman v. Simmons-Harris, which approved the inclusion of Catholic and other religious private schools in the Cleveland voucher program for disadvantaged families, a robust and living form of religious liberty has been realized in the right of educational choice for Catholic education.
The Catechism of the Catholic School recognizes the fundamental right of parents to choose the school for their children in keeping with their religious faith:
"As those first responsible for the education of their children, parents have the right to choose a school for them which corresponds to their own convictions. This right is fundamental. As far as possible parents have the duty of choosing schools that will best help them in their task as Christian educators. Public authorities have the duty of guaranteeing this parental right and of ensuring the concrete conditions for its exercise." Catechism of the Catholic Church, para. 2229.
The Free Exercise Clause of the First Amendment of the Constitution speaks in terms of “free exercise” of religious faith, The plain import of this phrase – “free exercise” – is that of acting upon one’s beliefs. “Exercise” denotes action, not merely passive contemplation. As Catholics, we among believers are especially drawn to collective exercise of our faith, in the aptly-named Mass and the other Sacraments.
Coming together as a community in Catholic education is also a vital form of devotion and religious expression. When, as but one pedestrian example, my daugher and her class-mates talk about Christian themes in a great literary work in English class in a Catholic high school, knowing that such a discussion is welcomed and encouraged, their faith is exercised and the blessings of religious liberty are realized again.
By choosing Catholic education for our children, we continue in a long-standing tradition and participate actively in that continuing exercise of religious liberty. And whatever choices we make as families, whether to parish or public schools or alternative arrangements such as home-schooling, we can join together in this weekend’s celebration of our nation’s birth by celebrating as well the cherished freedom to make educational choices for our children. Let us also remain committed to expanding those opportunities for all.
Happy Fourth of July!
https://mirrorofjustice.blogs.com/mirrorofjustice/2010/07/the-case-for-catholic-schools-part-six-exercising-religious-liberty.html
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Excellent series! In entry two you said "More importantly, for today’s discussion, our faith is to be lived out with others, so that our children learn to care for their neighbors and to join with them in Catholic teaching and worship. Catholic schools make that practically possible.". I am not sure if by this you mean that homeschool kids have insufficient interaction with their community and parish, or if you are referring to your point 2 of 5 that parochial schools need increased enrollment.
To the extent you might be suggesting the former, it is a common critique of homeschooling and is factually inaccurate. Catholic homeschool families are very active in local communities and parishes. Parish involvement can be more extensive in some ways, including daily Mass and other parish functions in an accentuated way, whereas the school population can sometimes have little interaction with the general parish population. On a general level, homeschooled children are not only "socialized," they are socialized in preferable ways. Of course contrary anecdotes could be related of poorly socialized homeschoolers, which could be countered by poorly socialized parochial schoolers and especially public schoolers. The important thing to realize is that socialization and community interaction are quality based, not quantity based. Homeschool kids do have plenty of quantity: with other homeschool families, and with community extracurriculars; but more importantly their socialization patterns are healthy. First, they interact with kids of all ages and in conversation with adults, instead of being artificially grouped by their birth year for the vast bulk of their school lives. Second, the public school time structure is grossly inordinate in removing children from their families for 7 hours a day from age 4, and unfortunately Catholic schools keep basically the same schedule. Not only is it not necessary for proper socialization for kids to spend that swath of time with 25 kids of one's birth year--it is not as socially healthy to do so especially for grade school kids, because it is a major cut in family bonding time that would act as a foundation for healthy external social interaction. It's also a massive waste of time, as most homeschoolers can report by the actual time it takes them to complete what is usually a superior curriculum. And third,instead of being with family during those 35 hours a week, kids in all but the best parochial schools are inculturated into the Miley Cyrus and Lil' Wayne fan clubs. Peer pop culture is a serious problem of even parochial schools, and even those with good religion programs. I'm not advocating isolationism any more than parochial schools or even responsible parental restriction on peer interaction could be called isolationism. My 7 year old interacts with the gamut of local parochial and public school populations in rec league sports and such, but it is in much much smaller doses, and with our supervision so we can monitor exposure to bad attitudes and bad influences. Many parochial schools have a significant share of kids from homes where pop culture consumption is restricted very little, and parental involvement in daily education of their children is on the whole minimal.
This leads to the other thing I think your statement may have meant: that homeschooling is less preferable because it doesn't boost enrollment in the parochial school. But this argument, like all five of your points, applies equally to any Catholic education option including homeschooling: the more the merrier. The families homeschooling near me enable me to homeschool better, and we have had several families homeschool because of the existence of currently homeschooling families. You may reply, as you mentioned above, that homeschooling isn't a practical option for most parents. I think you might mean that parents don't have the personal tools needed to teach, and/or that they are double income so they don't have a parent at home. But homeschooling is a growing movement and most involved once thought doing it wasn't possible to actually organize and teach their kids. Exposure to and support from other parish homeschooling families, and to tons of helpful materials out there nowadays, has led many parents to realize that they can do it. Literate parents can thrive at homeschooling. To the extent that jobs keep parents from having one parent at home to teach the kids, that also implicates their ability to pay parochial school tuition. And it feeds into the problems mentioned above, of all-day school hours functioning as daycare away from family instead of needed instruction time, and of kids in that system being more raised at home by pop culture rather than by their parents.
The principle of needing kids for Catholic school enrollment so as to benefit others should not be used to pit one good Catholic educational option against another, because somebody could always argue that if you put your kids into the neighborhood public school you could use the parochial school tuition-money that you would have spent and give it to some other worthy community need that Catholics are generally obliged to support. Parents can and should make the best choices for their kids even above competing interests of others. Many parents judge that homeschooling gives the best to their children in terms of pedagogy, specific curricular choices, low student-teacher ratio, a teacher who knows best how the child learns, a chance to move faster or slower in different subjects as needed, well-rounded socialization and involvement in community and parish life, family time, faith and virtue cultivation, and healthy peer culture. Such parents' inviolable duty as primary educators doesn't give way to argued benefits to other people, especially when the choice to be a Catholic homeschool family also helps other people for reasons similar to those argued. As I suggested elsewhere, if dioceses and Catholic thinkers started to treat Catholic education as an organic whole including homeschooling and parochial schooling together with other options, then more tangible opportunities will arise for the various options to mutually enrich each other at the parish level.