Because living in an isolated, nuclear family hovering over and over-protecting our kids is unnatural and unhealthy in my opinion. Like someone said, why belong to the Catholic Church if you trust no one in it? Why not start your own church on your own island. Seriously.
I think these parents are rebellious and disobedient and are most likely wanting to instill their own narrow interpretation of Catholicism in their children, and are fear-filled, and want to raise fear-filled kids, who set themselves apart from the universal church as better. I think there’s a lot of pride involved here.
If you think you can put all home schoolers in the same bucket, you can’t possibly know too many of them. Depicting the whole lot as disobedient or rebellious is unfair. I say this as a parent who teaches RE, who has let other people teach my kids while I taught another class, and who has kids in a non-parochial school. I take the trouble to know who’s teaching my kids. There are cases where I would feel no choice but to do it myself.
I want to address the idea that the nuclear family is somehow a stunting environment for education or child-rearing. That is not necessarily true, any more than the idea that exposure to the entire parish will make a child more secure and well-rounded. I don’t know a home schooler who doesn’t know families who home schooled with disasterous results that the parents would not admit…just like any other school system. It makes the others in the same system cringe, of course! Nevertheless, it depends on the family, the parish school, and the community school, though. Healthy and educated children can come out of all three.
I don’t know where to start…
I think that the Church is in a desert right now, and the whole chatechisis issue is just a symptom of the bigger problem. The parents of today where raised in an environment where CCD was abandoned for a more user friendly Religious Ed. The result is that the instructors, by and large, are well meaning but are themselves poorly catechized. There is a blind-leading-the-blind vibe going on at times. (There are many well trained instructors as well.)
Given that backdrop, I don’t blame people who have already taken the plunge to homeschool to want to extend it to religious ed. I wish they would participate to make it RE better, but. you know, RE is just a reflection of all of the other things that are wrong in the Church - lack of reverence due to a lack of belief.
I’d say that “in the desert” is a bit overstated, unless it is meant in the sense that the Church now, as always, has her issues and attackers. You are right about parents and catechists being far more fact-deficient than in the fairly recent past…as a whole. As above, one can’t make blanket statements. Again, though, would allege this is true for the whole spectrum of education, not just religion. We should remember, though, that in the context of 2,000 years of Church history, our educational standards are fairly high now. There have been times in Church history when men were ordained with less theology under their belts than can be found in the Baltimore catechism series. So we may feel more beset because something of a golden age is so recent in our memory.
The lack of reverence is also a spectrum-wide issue. Just as the sins of baseball legends and presidents past were kept secret, so as to lower the bar for the faithful to keep faith, so it is in the Church. I don’t think it bad that there are less places for darkness to hide, but once respect goes, reverence is not going to be far behind. We are in an age where ugly truths are not given so many hiding places, but because of the way those are revealed, it is flippant and cynical age, too. We haven’t caught up with an adult understanding of how to respect authority while being all too aware of human frailty. As respect goes, so does reverence…show me a disrespectful age or place that was reverent.
At any rate, I totally agree that this deficit is why parents who feel that they cannot responsibly leave their children’s math education in the hands of the parish school logically will feel the same way about religious education. Are there agendas in home schoolers? There is no place in education that free of agendas or politics, hidden and otherwise. I’m not so sure that’s a new thing, either. We could concede the point; it still wouldn’t be relevant. People with agendas still have a right to the sacraments. Somebody has to be left to receive Holy Communion on Sunday, after all. They also have the right and duty, according to Church teaching, to educate their own children.
What about sacramental preparation being a pastoral perogative? It is a real push to imply that it takes two years of Wednesday evenings to prepare a well-educated child to receive the Sacraments. I don’t see how that flies. I do see how it will take a diplomatic parent to make that point with any positive results.
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) Or a seminarian. Or the RE teachers at the parish. Again: be very sympathetic to any downsides experienced from the perspective of those you need on your side.