The issue of parish CCD/faith formation ranging from wishy-washy to outright heretical is a serious one with lifelong (at least) consequences, and a major reason why I can understand homeschool groups embarking on some kind of parallel catechesis. My parents' answer to this very real concern was to sign up to teach the classes my sibling…
The issue of parish CCD/faith formation ranging from wishy-washy to outright heretical is a serious one with lifelong (at least) consequences, and a major reason why I can understand homeschool groups embarking on some kind of parallel catechesis. My parents' answer to this very real concern was to sign up to teach the classes my siblings and I took each year. The parish was completely starved for available teachers, so they were quite happy to let my parents work their way up the grades until they were consistently teaching Confirmation/RCIA [sic] classes.
Yes - not seeing the willingness of many parents who are dissatisfied with parish and diocesan programs volunteering to participate and make them better. The common good is once again taking a back seat to me, myself, and I/my family. Missionary discipleship is not a one-on-one sport but it is a messy contact sport.
This is laughably uncharitable and Inaccurate. Like I actually chuckled!
You don’t think folks who are dissatisfied are the ones volunteering? Every single. homeschool. family I know is involved in their parish in some way - leading atrium (heavily intensive training to be a catechist in this Montessori model. Can’t just show up and teach but have to commit to year of classes to be trained), Leading and volunteering in VBS and little church summer camps, CYO sports, youth group, AHG and Trail Life, family nights and parish carnivals.
They literally ARE the ones doing it AND homeschooling multiple kids AND typically trying to make it on one or less than two full incomes.
We are out here missionary-ing our tails off but somehow none of that is valid or legitimate bc our children aren’t in a classroom 1.5 hours a week learning from a textbook about the faith (maybe. Hopefully if you have a decent program!) when they already DO catechism class in their own home every other day of the week as part of their school.
If you think the people being discussed in these homeschool groups only care about me myself and their own family, sir, I invite you to speak to some in person. Please. We are out here trying our HARDEST to live and work and pray and raise our children as faithful to the Church as we know how and you’d see that if you met some of these “unwilling to volunteer” parents.
Here’s what I don’t track - your answer is predicated with the initial condition : “we are dissatisfied, hence we home-school”. That was never an option for my family in the 12+ years I taught in the classroom in the parish. I tried to make what may have been presented uninterestingly as interesting and engaging. And it took a lot of time & preparation. I now teach/ catechize adults in the parish in the classroom. So I guess I missed the incipient tidal wave of home schooling and never understood why addressing the root cause of that has never been addressed. With adults it’s obviously much simpler - if you don’t show, we don’t provide distance learning to focus on community.
its absolutely not predicated on the initial condition that we are homeschooling because we are dissatisfied.
its predicated on a. the parents are the primary educators of their own children as defined *by the Church herself* and it is up to THEM to determine the means best suited to form their children. many parents are happy to utilize offerings of CCD programs but that doesn't *meet the needs* of others AND OR many parents are happy to *do. it. them. selves.*
and b. the only way to build community, parish unity and the Christian faithful is NOT the desks in a classroom once a week coursework from a text.
I missed the part of Acts of the Apostles where everyone attended a once a week desk course with textbooks. Good for you for making interesting and engaging presentations, as well as prepping for class. Guess what? Parents are doing that too! For their own kids! Its great to have such services offered, but some of us already already DOING the service.
The initial conditions of homeschooling families are not at all what you describe. The fact that dissatisfaction with what is offering in many parish RE programs comes into play as additional factors but is was never stated as initial starting point by the people doing it.
Regarding your (a), I handed on day one/session one every parent a letter making it abundantly clear that they were their child’s primary educator in the faith. So no need to rehash that.
My daughter is 31 now, but when I taught - and the pastor made the rules - homeschooling was the narrow exception rather than an appreciable fraction of kids. And if kids weren’t catechized - in your terms, in a desk with a textbook - they did not receive the sacraments in the parish.
Calling me “uncharitable” is a bit much and a bit defensive. Nevertheless I hope your parish and you in some way guide your children - infused with divine life in baptism - along their participatory and maturing journey to the fullness of divine life. Amen.
Please….. my original concern - how is the root cause of deficient religious Ed getting fixed? As church we all own it. Spare me your non-sequitur garbage. I try to solve problems, not propagate workarounds.
Ha! Well, in my experience, one avenue for a solution is exactly what the now-banned homeschool groups are trying to do- work within their constraints to provide catechesis for those in their charge. (Their constraints= let’s do it during the school day, let’s do it in the context of this homeschool community with the parish, etc). And that solution is getting shut down! So telling folks “no, not THAT way!” Is not necessarily constructive either. It is probably the case that it will take multiple approaches to fix a problem that is decades in the making.
There are a lot of people who can only see a problem through the lens of an existing structure or institution. I think a lot of homeschool parents see things fundamentally different. They look at the existing structures and say "I could spend all my time trying to fix something with a very limited prospect of success or I could just get on with the business of doing what must be done - educating and transmitting the faith to my children". For those who can only see the problem in institutional terms, there's little you can say to convince them. That's why parallel structures or practices exist in the first place. Some of these parallel practices will succeed. Some won't. A healthy Church would be able to incorporate all this. But we don't live in a healthy Church unfortunately.
BTW - when i say "existing structure or institution" i don't mean the divinely ordained structure of the Church. I mean the structures and practices of how we get on with our daily lives as families, parishes and dioceses. There's nothing divinely ordained about the way we've done education and catechesis over the last 100 years.
The first responsibility of a parent is to their children, not to their parish. That is why they can move and leave the parish behind, but they cannot move and leave their children behind. For a mother or father, the family is literally the primary responsibility. It isn't selfishness to put it first - it's an obligation. The *pastor* has the parish as his primary obligation. He also has the catechesis as his responsibility.
I don't think there needs to be a "root cause" of homeschooling, as it is the default catechetical mode of a family. School/religious education are the deviation from the anthropological and historical norm, not home education.
I was talking to a friend about this very point today. So many times, discussions about education models are influenced by the erroneous idea that majority-day classroom models are the norm, when in the course of history at large, in the course of the history of the Church, and in the history of the United States, majority-day classroom setting education is very new.
How did they manage to teach all of the classes? At least in my parish, all the classes occur at the same time, so that parents don't wind up spending the whole day there, wrangling children who aren't currently in class. As soon as you get past two kids, that solution might not work - even if you are good at classroom-style teaching.
My father taught my class and my mother taught my sister's class, which were at the same time. My younger brother was too small for CCD so he just chilled in my sister's class. After the first round of Sunday School, my parents would co-teach the Confirmation class, which was held an hour after everything else, and all three of us littlings would sit in the back and listen. By the time I got to my parents' Confirmation class myself, my brother was old enough to start taking in the material, so they switched back to the same pattern but for the younger two.
LOL! I can see that. I've tried to cheer up some mothers who were scared of homeschooling because they were sure they'd murder their children, by telling them that kids can tell how close they are to being murdered, and they ensure that they don't cross that line. They will either get right up against it in 3 hours/day, or they'll get right up against it in 24 hours/day, so your overall frustration levels won't change a bit!
The issue of parish CCD/faith formation ranging from wishy-washy to outright heretical is a serious one with lifelong (at least) consequences, and a major reason why I can understand homeschool groups embarking on some kind of parallel catechesis. My parents' answer to this very real concern was to sign up to teach the classes my siblings and I took each year. The parish was completely starved for available teachers, so they were quite happy to let my parents work their way up the grades until they were consistently teaching Confirmation/RCIA [sic] classes.
Yes - not seeing the willingness of many parents who are dissatisfied with parish and diocesan programs volunteering to participate and make them better. The common good is once again taking a back seat to me, myself, and I/my family. Missionary discipleship is not a one-on-one sport but it is a messy contact sport.
This is laughably uncharitable and Inaccurate. Like I actually chuckled!
You don’t think folks who are dissatisfied are the ones volunteering? Every single. homeschool. family I know is involved in their parish in some way - leading atrium (heavily intensive training to be a catechist in this Montessori model. Can’t just show up and teach but have to commit to year of classes to be trained), Leading and volunteering in VBS and little church summer camps, CYO sports, youth group, AHG and Trail Life, family nights and parish carnivals.
They literally ARE the ones doing it AND homeschooling multiple kids AND typically trying to make it on one or less than two full incomes.
We are out here missionary-ing our tails off but somehow none of that is valid or legitimate bc our children aren’t in a classroom 1.5 hours a week learning from a textbook about the faith (maybe. Hopefully if you have a decent program!) when they already DO catechism class in their own home every other day of the week as part of their school.
If you think the people being discussed in these homeschool groups only care about me myself and their own family, sir, I invite you to speak to some in person. Please. We are out here trying our HARDEST to live and work and pray and raise our children as faithful to the Church as we know how and you’d see that if you met some of these “unwilling to volunteer” parents.
Here’s what I don’t track - your answer is predicated with the initial condition : “we are dissatisfied, hence we home-school”. That was never an option for my family in the 12+ years I taught in the classroom in the parish. I tried to make what may have been presented uninterestingly as interesting and engaging. And it took a lot of time & preparation. I now teach/ catechize adults in the parish in the classroom. So I guess I missed the incipient tidal wave of home schooling and never understood why addressing the root cause of that has never been addressed. With adults it’s obviously much simpler - if you don’t show, we don’t provide distance learning to focus on community.
its absolutely not predicated on the initial condition that we are homeschooling because we are dissatisfied.
its predicated on a. the parents are the primary educators of their own children as defined *by the Church herself* and it is up to THEM to determine the means best suited to form their children. many parents are happy to utilize offerings of CCD programs but that doesn't *meet the needs* of others AND OR many parents are happy to *do. it. them. selves.*
and b. the only way to build community, parish unity and the Christian faithful is NOT the desks in a classroom once a week coursework from a text.
I missed the part of Acts of the Apostles where everyone attended a once a week desk course with textbooks. Good for you for making interesting and engaging presentations, as well as prepping for class. Guess what? Parents are doing that too! For their own kids! Its great to have such services offered, but some of us already already DOING the service.
The initial conditions of homeschooling families are not at all what you describe. The fact that dissatisfaction with what is offering in many parish RE programs comes into play as additional factors but is was never stated as initial starting point by the people doing it.
Regarding your (a), I handed on day one/session one every parent a letter making it abundantly clear that they were their child’s primary educator in the faith. So no need to rehash that.
My daughter is 31 now, but when I taught - and the pastor made the rules - homeschooling was the narrow exception rather than an appreciable fraction of kids. And if kids weren’t catechized - in your terms, in a desk with a textbook - they did not receive the sacraments in the parish.
Calling me “uncharitable” is a bit much and a bit defensive. Nevertheless I hope your parish and you in some way guide your children - infused with divine life in baptism - along their participatory and maturing journey to the fullness of divine life. Amen.
This is all a total non-sequitur to your original claim that the concerned parents do not volunteer (?)
Please….. my original concern - how is the root cause of deficient religious Ed getting fixed? As church we all own it. Spare me your non-sequitur garbage. I try to solve problems, not propagate workarounds.
Ha! Well, in my experience, one avenue for a solution is exactly what the now-banned homeschool groups are trying to do- work within their constraints to provide catechesis for those in their charge. (Their constraints= let’s do it during the school day, let’s do it in the context of this homeschool community with the parish, etc). And that solution is getting shut down! So telling folks “no, not THAT way!” Is not necessarily constructive either. It is probably the case that it will take multiple approaches to fix a problem that is decades in the making.
There are a lot of people who can only see a problem through the lens of an existing structure or institution. I think a lot of homeschool parents see things fundamentally different. They look at the existing structures and say "I could spend all my time trying to fix something with a very limited prospect of success or I could just get on with the business of doing what must be done - educating and transmitting the faith to my children". For those who can only see the problem in institutional terms, there's little you can say to convince them. That's why parallel structures or practices exist in the first place. Some of these parallel practices will succeed. Some won't. A healthy Church would be able to incorporate all this. But we don't live in a healthy Church unfortunately.
BTW - when i say "existing structure or institution" i don't mean the divinely ordained structure of the Church. I mean the structures and practices of how we get on with our daily lives as families, parishes and dioceses. There's nothing divinely ordained about the way we've done education and catechesis over the last 100 years.
The first responsibility of a parent is to their children, not to their parish. That is why they can move and leave the parish behind, but they cannot move and leave their children behind. For a mother or father, the family is literally the primary responsibility. It isn't selfishness to put it first - it's an obligation. The *pastor* has the parish as his primary obligation. He also has the catechesis as his responsibility.
I don't think there needs to be a "root cause" of homeschooling, as it is the default catechetical mode of a family. School/religious education are the deviation from the anthropological and historical norm, not home education.
(my kids go to school)
Exactly this!
I was talking to a friend about this very point today. So many times, discussions about education models are influenced by the erroneous idea that majority-day classroom models are the norm, when in the course of history at large, in the course of the history of the Church, and in the history of the United States, majority-day classroom setting education is very new.
How did they manage to teach all of the classes? At least in my parish, all the classes occur at the same time, so that parents don't wind up spending the whole day there, wrangling children who aren't currently in class. As soon as you get past two kids, that solution might not work - even if you are good at classroom-style teaching.
My father taught my class and my mother taught my sister's class, which were at the same time. My younger brother was too small for CCD so he just chilled in my sister's class. After the first round of Sunday School, my parents would co-teach the Confirmation class, which was held an hour after everything else, and all three of us littlings would sit in the back and listen. By the time I got to my parents' Confirmation class myself, my brother was old enough to start taking in the material, so they switched back to the same pattern but for the younger two.
Oh, ok. Staggered classes.
I think I would be approximately nine-tenths dead after two rounds of teaching classes.
I think my mom found it a welcome break from homeschooling us during the rest of the week!
LOL! I can see that. I've tried to cheer up some mothers who were scared of homeschooling because they were sure they'd murder their children, by telling them that kids can tell how close they are to being murdered, and they ensure that they don't cross that line. They will either get right up against it in 3 hours/day, or they'll get right up against it in 24 hours/day, so your overall frustration levels won't change a bit!
On point advice.