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CDNowak
Guest
1 priest, 1 paid co-ordinator, 15 hrs… that’s 7.5 hours of interviews/person before volunteers (1 volunteer= 5hrs, 3 volunteers = 3 hrs, 13 volunteers = 1 hr) 4 times/ yr.
Strawman.
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Strawman.
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EasterJoy
Guest
I don’t mean this as a flame, but just asking you to think for a minute about what you just wrote.
Have you not been in one of those minorities? Have you never been fully able to do something, but denied the chance because someone else thought it might be an inconvenience, or just because they didn’t believe that giving you a chance was worth the trouble?
Sometimes, jurisprudence is needed to give us our chances, because sometimes the common prudence needed is insufficient. I grew up hearing that women were not capable of running fork lifts or trucks, that sports programs for girls were just not as important as for the boys. Of course, this turned out not to be true. Do you remember that some people thought that providing women’s bathrooms at work sites was itself already too much of an accomodation to make that happen? That it would hurt women if they were allowed play sports, let alone run marathons? I do. I remember when people thought it was too much for people in wheelchairs to expect that buildings, including churches, have ramps instead of stairs. When I was a mom with twins in a stroller, I was happy that those days were gone. Do you ever wonder how many wheelchair-bound people quit going to church before that happened? I remember when people with dyslexia were told they were stupid or uneducable or that the accomodations they needed were not fair to people who saw things clearly. How many fine minds did that waste? And let us not forget that we all hope to get old, and thank goodness for people who made it clear that age alone isn’t an excuse to put anyone on a shelf.
Increasing access does not just benefit the people who get the access. It lets them make contributions that benefit everybody. If allowing access isn’t possible, fine. But don’t resent people for trying. Look into the past: Accomodating them has not hurt the men or the boys, the able-bodied, the typical readers, or the young. It has helped everyone. Besides, if you take out the “minorities” who have won a fair chance in our lifetimes, the remainder does not constitute a majority any more.
I don’t home school, but I am convinced that allowing home schoolers into the sacramental “school system” as home schoolers will benefit the Church. I think the idea should be given a try. There may be barriers, I’m not saying all the objections raised have been groundless, but I feel sure that if charity is remembered, a way can be found.
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jmcrae
Guest
Well, if it’s just a few kids, then it certainly would not be 15 hours. If there are a substantialy number of homeschooled kids, that means that there are a substantial number of homeschool parents to tap to conduct the interviews.
There, problem solved
My original point, though, was that it shouldn’t cost more resources (whether volunteer or paid) to do a cancelled program than to do a program that is actually operational. It is more efficient in terms of manpower for one or two teachers to teach 45 kids than to have one adult or two adults teaching each kid, separately, and then having again more volunteers to do the interviews to make sure that each of the 45-90 adults was teaching the same basics.
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EasterJoy
Guest
If the CCC didn’t say it, a single year of teaching RE would make it abundantly clear. It is parents that bring children to the faith. For anyone else to do it is a tremendous mountain to climb.
RE should ideally exist to help parents, not to take over for them. Once you go there, just give it up. You will have enabled the parents who shirk, and disabled the parents who don’t. The most dedicated teachers in the world won’t make up for that loss.
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jmcrae
Guest
Actually, they are opting out of the Sacramental Preparation program. They don’t want to have their kids share information and experiences with other kids; they don’t want their kids to participate at all with the parish program. That’s the whole argument - they don’t want their kids mixing with “regular” kids, or having any contact with the catechist from the parish.
Home-schooled kids do add a great deal to any program they are in - they are a joy to work with, and raise the tone of any conversation they are part of. The problem is, they don’t want to be part of this conversation.
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jmcrae
Guest
Right, exactly. Nobody is saying that parents can’t continue to teach their kids at home. We ask (we don’t require) that kids come for four sessions, each session being half an hour, to go over the basics for the Sacrament of Reconciliation.
Nobody - certainly not the Catechists - expects the kids to learn absolutely everything they will ever know about the Sacrament of Reconciliation from those four half-hour sessions. But it gives them a common starting point - a jumping-off place for conversations they can have with their parents at home, with their friends and teachers at school, and enough of a basic understanding so that when they go into the Confessional, they’ll feel confident that they know what they’re doing and why they’re there.
Obviously, none of it will mean anything, if the parents never take their kids to Confession again, or never discuss it at home. Parents are, indeed, the primary teachers of the faith. But there is an equal and opposite danger that if the parents are going it alone, the kids will come to feel “weird” - without the reinforcement of the community, they may come to feel that their parents are the only ones who believe as they do.
Part of the role of the Catechist is to be that outside affirmation, that yes, your parents are teaching you the things that we are all supposed to believe in.
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EasterJoy
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You have to admit, by saying that there is a clear and positive difference between home schooled kids and non-home schooled kids, the decision of the parents to school them separately hasn’t hurt the kids, right? It is not as if these children are social cripples that the parents have been shielding from normal development. (I have met a few more-than-odd home schooled kids, but it isn’t the rule, and the ratio of socially able-to-unable isn’t worse than in public schools.) I can tell you right now that there are home schooling parents who are concerned that their kids are going to come home with bad habits they didn’t learn at home. Is that concern totally without merit, even in RE?
Is it really snotty for educators not to want to put their limited time into classes where the students will learn nothing new, but will hear bad grammar and questionable theology, even from teachers (I have heard it with my own ears), engage in conversations that are lower in caliber than in previous classes where they have already mastered the exact same material? I don’t think so. It is a pointless exercise for them. Again, if it were an out-of-parish parochial school, the question would be absurd. Does it matter that these students’ Catholic school is at home, and their teacher is also their parent?
After all, the exact same argument could be used (and has been used, although with futility) to say that kids in private and parochial schools should be forced to go to the public schools. When you allow private and parochial schools, the kids with the most involved parents are syphoned right off of the top. It hurts the public schools! And all the kids that are too difficult or whose parents aren’t involved enough to survive in the private and parochial schools are dumped back on to the public school system. It is the truth. But that isn’t a fair reason to disallow private or parochial schools. We’re not going to close the parish schools because their existence robs the public schools of some advantage. That refusal reflects no lack of charity.
Besides, these parents deserve to know why investing their time in this system is a requirement, and not simply an opportunity that is open to them. Approximately 40-60 1 hour evening classes is a very big investment in time. Home schoolers are not exempt from the pressure to over-schedule. If the parish has a real need for that time, or the pastor feels every single kid in the parish needs that time, even if they are in the parish school by day, fine. But the demands must be justified, and fairly distributed.
Our parish has parish-wide retreats that the parish school and public school students are required to attend together. Making the home school kids go to those is fair. I think that making service within the parish part of demonstrating that you actually belong to a parish is fair. I’m not suggesting that we effectively have sub-parish-level ghettos for the publicly-schooled, parochial-schooled, and the home-schooled. Compulsory preparatory events do address that. But to require home school students to do things or attend classes that kids in the parish school don’t have to do is an additional barrier to the sacraments that is hard to justify. Why would we even want to, then?
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PaulinVA
Guest
No. I made no statement about the Church at all. I was talking about the people and what they do with those rights the church has granted them.
Easter Joy - your post, while well written, does not provide any analogous situations. Homeschoolers are not being discriminated against. They are not handicapped or a protected class.
I have tried over the past year to support home schoolers. In the end, I just don’t understand them and their need to do everything for themselves to the exclusion of everyone else. As jmcrae said, I’m sure they would be an asset to any parish program they participated in.
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EasterJoy
Guest
I just mean that if a preparatory event is so important as to be compulsory, the parish would make the daytime parish school kids attend it, too. Otherwise, you have the “parish school neighborhood” and the “RE ghetto”. Even without home schoolers in the mix, that is problematic. Lumping Catholic home schoolers with secular public schools, though…well, you can see where insult might be taken.
Have you talked to home schooled kids and found that they feel “weird” or that they are unaware that they share their parents’ Catholic faith with those in their parish and around the world? Because I think while that danger may be opposite, it is nothing like equal. In fact, it is fairly far-fetched. Yes, the “foxhole” parents home school. That doesn’t mean it is fair to paint all home school parents with that brush. You may just as well decide that all parents with kids in public school are unwilling to exert any effort for their kids. Even though public school is where the kids with lazy parents wind up, nothing could be farther from the truth.
Since one does not logically follow from the other, then, the connection needs to be demonstrated in order to be taken as a basis for policy.
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jmcrae
Guest
We do.
In fact, the first invitation to come to these preparation sessions goes to the Catholic schools. What they do in Catholic School in the academic program is important, but it’s not the “proximate preparation” for the Sacrament. The Bishop requires that we hold the “proximate preparation” at the parish; not at the school, so that it doesn’t become confused with the academic religion program (and also so that non-Catholic students attending Catholic schools aren’t left with nothing to do while the rest of their classmates are doing Sacramental Preparation, but that’s more of a side issue).
I have only ever had one public school student attend our program, and I’m not even sure how she heard about the program - there is also a program for public school students, but I’ve never seen home-schoolers invited to that one, never mind “required” to attend it.
I’ve known lots of home-schooled kids, and the first thing out of their mouths is, “Don’t think I’m weird, just because I’m home-schooled.” So, they perceive that they might be perceived as “weird.” And yes, it sometimes comes as a surprise to them that everyone else at their Church believes the same as what they believe - they are sometimes under the impression that they are “super-Catholics,” or “more religious than most people.”
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CDNowak
Guest
But is the parish program an asset to the homeschoolers?
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EasterJoy
Guest
Ahem, but the situation is analogous. Women are not handicapped. Older people are not a protected class…at least, if they had been treated fairly in the first place, they wouldn’t be, depending on what your definition of “protected class” is. These are people who were kept from doing what they were fully capable of doing by other people who thought that they could judge what others should be allowed to do by their own prejudices about them (prejudices sometimes drawn from their worst experiences of the class, but just as often made up out of thin air) and who were denied a fair share of group resources because some other part of the group had become accustomed to perenially cornering of the fat side of the hog. Even people in wheelchairs could fairly ask why concrete was available for stairs, but not for ramps, and how did the stairs magically get to be the right size for people instead of for cats? It is not as if the design of stairs were mandated by nature. They were designed by people,* to accomodate the abilities of other people*. So unless you think needing protection from unfair prejudice makes a group into a “protected class”, I don’t see your point. I guess the answer is “No, no one has ever put artificial barriers between me and what I’m capable of doing.” Who, exactly, has been in the protected class, then? You may not be so lucky forever.
But…OK, here’s your example: What are the probable origins of the word “Paddywagon”? Do laws that forbid religious discrimination in the workplace make Catholics yet one more “protected class”? You have thirty seconds.
Think of home schoolers as people who actually educate, because they are. They are not amateurs, far less than most catechists. Their kids get school credit and graduate. “You are going to a Catholic school, you don’t have to go to this class, but you, also going to a Catholic school, have to attend.” How is that not discrimation? If we give them that much credit, requiring of them and their students what we require of other people who run out-of-parish Catholic schools and their students, we’ll be treating them fairly.
Requiring lawyers and other professional people to donate their talents to the parish would be a huge asset, too, and some parishes couldn’t survive if at least some of them didn’t do so voluntarily, but requiring it wouldn’t be right, would it?
We are not talking about evading requirements. We are talking about kids who already know the material or who are *legally free to learn religious material from Catholic teachers in their daytime school *being forced to attend night or weekend classes that they do not need.
This is not about getting out of group experiences. I’m not advocating that. I’m arguing against forcing people to meet time-consuming and artificial educational requirements that aren’t needed, just because somebody can’t be bothered make the effort to see that the need does not exist.
Why is forcing kids into classes they don’t need such a sacred cow?
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bethndanny
Guest
You’re right you made no statement about the Church, you could not have since the Church does not support your point of view.
You did say that you are “sick and tired” of people asserting their “rights” and making others accommodate them. Home schoolers are not making others “accommodate” them. Home schoolers are teaching their children the faith at home, as the Church prefers. It is those desiring mandatory CCD that are forcing individual parishes to “accommodate” them.You have met every home schooler and are quite sure that they exclude all others? I am, to use your words, “sick and tired” of people making sweeping generalizations of all home schoolers based on the few they have met.
You say home schoolers are not discriminated against while going on to make negative assumptions about an entire group of people, not based on their merit but on your own bias. How do you define discrimination?
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jmcrae
Guest
Did you read my post, above?Catholic school kids who attend regular classroom-style Catholic schools are the first to be invited to attend parish-based Sacramental Preparation programs.
The Bishop has asked that proximate preparation (direct preparation for the Sacraments) take place in the parish rather than in the Catholic school, so that there is no confusion between the academic study of religion that takes place in school, and the process of Sacramental Preparation.
Nobody is asking home-schooled kids to attend the program for public school kids.
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EasterJoy
Guest
Don’t think I’m helpless, just because I’m female.
Don’t think I’m a drunk, just because I’m Irish.
Don’t think I’m a lazy bum, just because I don’t have a job.
Don’t think I came from a broken home and a bad neighborhood, just because I’m black.
Don’t think I’m a religious fanatic, just because I have a crucifix hung at my neck and think abortion is wrong.
Don’t think I belong to the ACLU, think Obama walks on water, and favor taking everyone’s guns away just because I’m a Democrat.
Don’t think I worship George Bush, hate the environment and poor people, and only care about myself because I’m a Republican.
Maybe it isn’t home schooling that makes the kids expect that you will think they’re weird.
Maybe it is not because they’ve had too little experience being around other kids.
Maybe it is because they’ve had far too much experience with the prejudices flying around about home schooling.
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EasterJoy
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I was trying to say that what you described seemed reasonable.
Catholic school kids who attend regular classroom-style Catholic schools are the first to be invited to attend parish-based Sacramental Preparation programs.
The Bishop has asked that proximate preparation (direct preparation for the Sacraments) take place in the parish rather than in the Catholic school, so that there is no confusion between the academic study of religion that takes place in school, and the process of Sacramental Preparation.
Nobody is asking home-schooled kids to attend the program for public school kids.
I’m fine with requiring everybody to go to the same events, and it seems perfectly legal to me. If you can say, “Listen, the kids at the parish school learn all this in school, too, but that isn’t what this is about. This isn’t primarily an educational event, even though we cover some factual stuff. It isn’t primarily about how much your child knows, so nobody gets to test out of it. It is a parish event, where we all sit and talk about our faith together before making First Holy Communion together, and so everyone has to go to it. Your 2nd grader may have a PhD in theology, but she still gets to go, if she’s in our parish. The bishop has approved the requirement in just that form, so don’t call the chancery office. They won’t be able to help you.”
I am talking about parishes that require the whole 2 year RE sequence of everyone not in a parochial school. That isn’t right. The group events you’re talking about, in contrast, are of limited duration, not an undue burden, and required of everyone. The bishops have required that couples seeking marriage make certain preparations, and even that doesn’t legally impinge on the natural rights of adults, and so I don’t think that people objecting to group events, per se, have a leg to stand on. They can rightly object to the form or duration of what is required, they can rightly seek relief when compliance is impossible, but they don’t have a right to be exempted from requirements entirely.
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CDNowak
Guest
jmcrae, I have a confession to make. I have been negligent, as I so often am when it comes to acknowledgement. The program you describe as your parish’s does seem to be a good program, even accounting, to a large degree, for homeschoolers. It is not perfect in my eyes (ie Sacramental Prep. classes are an uncalled for hoop for any Catholic school or homeschooled student to jump through), but it is strides beyond where the majority of RE programs are.
Catholic school kids who attend regular classroom-style Catholic schools are the first to be invited to attend parish-based Sacramental Preparation programs.
The Bishop has asked that proximate preparation (direct preparation for the Sacraments) take place in the parish rather than in the Catholic school, so that there is no confusion between the academic study of religion that takes place in school, and the process of Sacramental Preparation.
Nobody is asking home-schooled kids to attend the program for public school kids.
However, it is far from common practice. The average homeschooler is forced between exercising their responsibility as a parent to educate their children and the obligations imposed on them by the pastor or bishop. The average homeschool student is significantly ahead of their “grade level” in any subject tested. The situation that so many advocate, including yourself, of having the homeschoolers in the class is an unequal yoking: holding back, at the risk of stunting, the growth of the strong.
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EasterJoy
Guest
So:
If you think being a home schooling Catholic means you should have the opportunity to prove you are operating a legitimate Catholic school for your children: I’m all for that.
If you think being a home schooling Catholic offers a legitimate way to shield your child from any meaningful contact with the rest of the Catholics in your parish, particularly the ones in his or her age group: not so much.
You’re Catholic, so you’re stuck with us. Saints and sinners, One Body. Like it or not, that’s an essential part of the faith, too.
If you think being a home schooling Catholic means you should have the opportunity to prove you are operating a legitimate Catholic school for your children: I’m all for that.
If you think being a home schooling Catholic offers a legitimate way to shield your child from any meaningful contact with the rest of the Catholics in your parish, particularly the ones in his or her age group: not so much.
You’re Catholic, so you’re stuck with us. Saints and sinners, One Body. Like it or not, that’s an essential part of the faith, too.
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Middleman
Guest
So you think that the kids back in the “good old days” of the Baltimore Catechisms were super excited and intellectually stimulated by learning their catechism?
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Learning123
Guest
I have not finished reading the thread, but I’ll go ahead and respond. Even with that being the case the priest or delegate should make sure key information has been retained and understood. As for home study students… Siblings help each other, other home stud children help each other, other adults help the child (grandparents, godparents, etc. that are involved in their lives), other kids in general. My daughter isn’t exactly shy about sharing her faith. It isn’t as if the child hears the concept or story just one time from one adult. Sure there may be a few only covered by one person, but even then it is covered more than once. A good Catholic school or home study program should cover many stories or concepts in more than just the religion class–part of most Reading assignments, in English assignments, part of Science, Art, etc. Ideally this is happening for all children, but it is certainly not neglected by home study children, or at the very least not by the mere fact that that home study.
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