This is a question that assumes its own answer. Yes, lonely homeschool students get lonely. Homeschool students who enjoy good culture and a balanced schedule do not get lonely. Remember, are lonely, friendly children in schools with hundreds of students. Loneliness is not caused by any certain form of schooling. It is a personal problem that can often be traced back to the parents.
When I was a kid, I was a popular, athletic kid in a large public school in central New Jersey–I was elected class clown in high school. My children have been home-schooled and we live in rural North Carolina, and they are less often lonely than I was as a kid. They are never without one or more partners for games, bike rides, basketball, hunting, fishing, running, lifting weights, video games, board games–on and on. Loneliness has nothing to do with one form of schooling or another. Lonely kids are lonely, wherever they go.
I feel bad for many Christian children because I see what their parents are doing. Their parents are zealous for religion, but with an ignorant zeal. Their minds hold a heretical notion, namely, that man is born pure and become corrupted by external influences that they have no power to resist. When this is assumed to be true, the only reasonable strategy in parenting is to isolate children from any imperfect external influences, which ends up meaning everyone and everything. While it may be true that such a child is protected from external influences, he suffers a host of different problems.
This homeschool culture of isolation is the practice of a flawed understanding of human nature, of human society, of sin and of grace.
Moreover, parents imagine that one form of schooling, or one curriculum, might cause their children to keep the Catholic faith. There are a number of problems with this.
First, faith is a theological, which means it is a power that God infuses into the soul. It does not come from parents. It does not come from education. It comes from God. We can teach our children about faith. We can pray for the grace of faith, for ourselves and our children. We can model a life of faith. We cannot, however, give our children faith to believe what God has revealed. Looking to education to do this is another bad idea that will have bad consequences.
Second, many parents have been influenced by Protestantism and imagine that they are preparing their children to choose to be Christians when they are adults. This is not true. Our children, if they are baptized, are already Christians. Our children are already members of the Catholic Church. When we speak to our children of the Catholic faith, we should not speak of it as a community to which they must join themselves, but into which they are already grafted. God has already received them. They simply need to be what they are. That’s a challenging task as our own lives prove. We need to give them the same comfort we give ourselves when we struggle.
Third, the duty of parents is not to control their children’s lives and make them independently obedient Catholic adults. This is a self-contradiction, for parents do not control their adult children. Our children, as adults, are independent souls with free will. We must understand our duties to our children and not go beyond them. Our duty is to introduce our children to the Catholic faith and initiate them into the Christian community (i.e., the parish), not control them like puppets. That’s not Christianity.
So, before we begin evaluating homeschooling, we need to evaluate our own ideas about education, parenting and the Christian life. The problem is usually there–not in education, and not in our children.
Mr. William C. Michael, O.P.
Headmaster
Classical Liberal Arts Academy
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