In a modern secular public school, students participate in academic activities for 4-5 hours per day, for 180 days of the year. That makes for 720-900 hours of academic activity per year. That sounds impressive until you realize that there are 8,760 hours in a year and study is our children’s primary responsibility. What are all of these children doing with the other 8,000 hours of the year?
Now, when we look at Catholic society, we find something very different, right?
Actually, no.
Somehow, Catholic children have managed to end up doing the same thing. The Catholic schools offer the same 4-5 hours of academic activity per school day for 180 days of the year.
Where did Catholics get this idea? They simply followed the secular public schools.
If you think that’s bad, you should see what many Catholic homeschool families are doing. They go even further. They use the modern school standards, which are intended for the general education of large groups of children, for their own private homeschool standards. Many Catholic homeschool parents boast that they can get all of their homeschooling done in far less time–sometimes as few as 2-3 hours per day.
Two questions Catholics don’t seem to think of are,
- “What are Catholics actually suppose to be studying?” and
- “How did the saints study it?”
Did Catholic children who lived before American public schools were invented study 2-3 hours a day? Did their schools offer 4-5 hours of academic activity for 180 days each year? Let’s consider some examples.
In the Ratio Studiorum, the rule of studies published by the Jesuits in 1599, Grammar was studied for four hours each day.
In the 16th century, Shakespeare attended school from sunrise to sunset, six days per week.
