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Homeschooling Catholic

© Kathryn Morse

As one school year comes to an end, some families are beginning plans for the next school year. These are homeschool families and planning ahead and getting materials together early helps families have a successful school year. Homeschooling is a great option for those who want a religious education for their child, but don't live near a parochial school. Other families homeschool for other reasons.

We became a homeschooling family before we became a Catholic family. I chose homeschooling for my daughter, Courtney, for a number of reasons.

First, my daughter can advance at her own rate which in most subjects is faster that that of public school classrooms. This had been a concern of mine since her first day of kindergarten. Courtney came home in tears. When I asked what was wrong, she replied, "They didn't teach me how to read." I called the teacher, to ask when they would start exposing the children to basic words, and she said not until first grade. Her class would only learn the letters of the alphabet. I had no news to console my child, so we went to the public library to stock up on books, especially the books with read-along tapes. And we worked on reading at home.

Another concern of mine had been exposure to sexual behavior and values that I think are bad, dangerous or, at least, inappropriate. When I was in seminary in the early 1980s, I helped a religious education major with a project to design/plan a retreat about marriage and sex for middle school students. She sat before me a stack of sex education books commonly used in the U.S.A. I was supposed to look for ideas and I found some that appalled me. One homework suggestion was for 14-year-olds to find a partner and practice certain intimate acts with each other. No one has yet to satisfactorily explain to me how kids can practice intimacy without being intimate.. And I am still very unhappy with the thought of people practicing, as in using, each other as objects. This article is supposed to be about homeschooling, so I won't elaborate any more on that.

Beyond the textbooks, there is the actual behavior of students. When Courtney was a toddler, we lived in a large U.S. mid-Atlantic city. After work, I'd often take her to a family clinic in our upper-class neighborhood for ear check-ups. Other moms with their high school children would be there, too. They would be there for their birth control, abortion, and pregnancy issues. I got really tired of overhearing the conversations about who was sleeping with whom, who was pregnant, who was keeping their child, etc. I knew I didn't want my daughter to go to the neighborhood public high school, but where do you go when you already live in a wealthy U.S. suburb and you suspect the private schools have the same kinds of behaviors (the kids just have even more money)? You end up going home! (In that metropolitan area where we used to live, over 8,000 students are now being homeschooled.)

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