While checking off graduation open-house invites and other end-of-school activities, I’d like to mention something I’ve touched on before: parents as primary leaders in the education of our children. With our right to this basic and unchallengeable duty under threat, the topic bears repeating.
If Covid taught us nothing else, it was this: that even the best educational system is no match for the loving and leading of a child’s own parents. I emphasize that, while no parent is perfect, and some are even negligent, no institute of higher education can replicate the nurturing that only a child’s parents or other primary caregivers within the home setting can provide.
And no government can ever be a substitute for the love of parents for their children. In fact, governments, if we rely on them wholly for this, ultimately will fail our children. We must not abrogate this esteemed responsibility to anyone, even if we rely on other systems to aid us in the task.
It may take a village, but that doesn’t mean the primary core guides of our children’s lives should be set aside as secondary. The parent-child relationship is primordial and God-given. Children are not things to be acquired and manipulated, but gifts to be nurtured for a divine purpose.
The Catechism of the Catholic Church (#2223) says it better than I could: “Parents have the first responsibility for the education of their children. They bear witness to this responsibility first by creating a home where tenderness, forgiveness, respect, fidelity, and disinterested service are the rule.”
The home, it continues, is the ideal place to teach the virtues, which requires learning of self-denial, sound judgment and self-mastery, “the pre-conditions for all true freedom.”
In this, material and instinctual dimensions ought to be subordinate to the interior and spiritual ones, the Catechism insists. “Parents have a grave responsibility to give good example to their children. By knowing how to acknowledge their own failings…parents will be better able to guide and correct them.”
Returning to Covid, one of its primary effects was peeling back the veil between home and school. Many parents, for the first time, recognized that they had put too much trust in the educational system. And I would argue this whether it’s a parochial or public school. No one and nothing can take the place of a loving parent, whose unconditional love cannot be manufactured or replicated.
I speak as one who grew up in a family of public-school teachers and with an adult child who teaches. Our family has benefited from both public and private schools and many excellent teachers have poured out their lives for our young ones.
But our educational systems are proving to be inadequate for this most sublime task of leading our children into the world to fulfill their God-given purpose. We only get one shot at this, so let’s be exceedingly thoughtful about it.
Parents, you are irreplaceable as your child’s primary educator. Own this, and live it with love and fortitude.
[For the sake of having a repository for my newspaper columns and articles, I reprint them here, with permission, a week after their run date. The preceding ran in The Forum newspaper on May 29 2023.]
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