I’d like to take some time today to talk about a plan for homeschooling that I would recommend for homeschooling parents who have no idea what they’re doing. When I say homeschooling parents who have no idea what they’re doing, I’m not being negative or critical. I’m being honest. I’m talking to Christian parents who desire to give their children a Christian education, who are concerned about the quality of modern schools, who love their children very much, who fear God and desire to honor Him as parents. But when it comes to education, when it comes to homeschooling, when it comes to college and career preparation, they have no idea what they’re doing. They don’t know how these things work. They don’t know how to prepare their children for the future. They may not know how homeschooling works and so on, but they have good intentions, and they want to do the best that they can.
Obviously, highly educated parents who work professionally in education, who have an abundance of resources that allow them to obtain products and expert help from others, they’re not going to need a whole lot of advice as they go along. But many families today, many, many, many parents are in a position where they’re struggling. They’re struggling financially. They’ve got a mom at home with the kids in her childbearing years. They may have multiple children already. They’re young as parents. Dad is trying to work and provide for the family, and that lifestyle is very challenging. There’s a reason why so many people avoid it. My wife and I, when we were young, in our 20s, we were struggling financially, just as is natural, not that there was any problem, but it takes years to get on your feet professionally, to establish stable financial home economy. And while we go through those lean years, while we go through those difficult years, we’re young, we don’t know what to do. We often don’t have a lot of support. Those are also the childbearing years and homeschooling needs to take place during those lean years, so to have a realistic plan that gives parents a clear sense of what needs to be done to take all pressure off, to drive away all unrealistic, silly expectations and focus on what are the actual duties of Christian parents and what is a no-fail plan for homeschooling, I believe is very helpful for most homeschooling families.
The danger that I would warn of is that in modern circles, there is a problem that’s known as Christian arrogance. It’s where people become Christians, and they think that because they’re Christians, they know how to do everything, that everything that they do is good, that their opinions are all brilliant, and they look at experienced people and scoff at them, as if you know that may be true for you, but that’s not true for me, because you know everything I do is going to be successful. And I’d like to warn you against that. I’d like to warn you that the work of homeschooling is very difficult. Think about the time commitment. It’s every day, all day for 18 years, and that’s just for one child. So if you have 4, 5, 6 children, I’ve got 10 children, that time and energy, the financial resources and challenges, it’s all multiplied, and if you don’t have a realistic plan, if you go into it arrogantly talking all kinds of nonsense about how you’re going to raise the most educated children who have ever lived, you’re going to raise a bunch of saints, even though there’s nothing in history that suggests that those claims are likely to be fulfilled, you’re probably going to fail. But if you have an honest plan, and if you enter into homeschooling with humility and with a practical prudence to understand what needs to be done and how it can be done, and if you have realistic, attainable, measurable goals for homeschooling, you can enjoy great success. And that’s what I’d like to talk about today. I’m going to be very practical, very simple, and I believe that this will be very helpful for honest homeschooling parents.
The first problem that homeschooling parents usually want to address is just the cultural problem of modern schools. We believe, as Christian parents that children, like young plants, need to be raised in an ideal environment. That is why we build nurseries and greenhouses for farms and gardens. We do not put seed in the ground outside and hope for the best. If we know that the elements and we know that there are insects and weeds that are going to harm a young plant, we don’t just stick seed in the ground and hope for the best. We actually create an artificial environment that’s carefully controlled because we know that these young plants can’t resist all of the challenges, all of the threats that they face. So we create a nursery, and we shelter young plants so that they have a chance to set their roots, sprout, you know, put out their first leaves, and begin to grow and gain strength, and even when we raise them in the nursery, we only introduce them to the elements little by little. It’s called hardening the plants. We start by moving seed trays and things out into the direct sunlight, out into the wind, and we continue to control their environment until they’re well established and strong, and we trust that they can resist those challenges.
The same is true for children. We don’t raise children by just tossing them into the world and hoping for the best. We love our children. There’s nothing we value more than our children, and we want them not to survive, but to thrive. We want them to be strong and healthy and happy. We want everything to go well for them, and to do that dropping them off at a local public school or even a local private school, that’s not a realistic way to raise a good child, and we know that the schools are not good. The schools scoff at traditional values. They don’t take responsibility for the success of every child. And whenever there are failures, the school just blames the parents, or blames the children, or they just label the children or sort them into groups and levels. There’s no responsibility for the success of the children, and that’s one of the fundamental flaws of the modern school system, and we know that we don’t want our children just lumped in with a bunch of kids who happen to be their age and then just be sorted and labeled and graded by the school staff. We want our individual children, our individual children, we want them to be taught and helped and supported. And modern schools are really not interested in doing that. They’re not capable of doing that.
And so, you know, in the old days, wealthy families would hire private tutors who would work with those children all day long. If you go back to classical culture, they had a servant called a pedagogue who literally accompanied a child all day long, through all of his studies, all of his activities, to make sure he was learning, he was following instructions, he was safe, he was behaving well, and so on. That was a luxury that was for wealthy people. The common people had no such benefits. They often had no education. So this idea that just because we’re Christians, we’re going to raise children with all of the benefits that ancient wealthy children had who were led around by servants and served by private tutors, it’s just not realistic, and we’ve got to respect the reality that those services are effective and necessary, and if we don’t have the means, don’t have the opportunity to provide those services, there are going to be negative consequences.
So when we think about modern schools, we have to be realistic and say, look, the school is a good option. It’s better than nothing, and if we want something better, we’re going to have to take matters into our own hands as parents, and thankfully, with all of the technology and resources we have available today, we can do things that parents in past generations had no chance to possibly do. Couldn’t even comprehend doing at home. So we’ve got to learn to be prudent about this, to understand what needs to be done, what the priorities are, what our actual possibilities are, and then we’ve got to have a realistic, actionable, measurable plan to get that work done.
So the first concern we have as homeschool parents is usually to give our children to put our children in an environment where they’re going to be cared for individually and helped to thrive individually. And that’s not modern school. So that’s the first concern. Secondly, we’re concerned about the actual instruction and content of our children’s education. We don’t want our children to receive the secular, democratic American education that’s provided in public schools. They’re Christian children. They need to receive a Christian education as Christians, there is a lot to learn. They need to learn Sacred Scripture. They need to be initiated into the life of the church. They need to be catechized. They need to be taught to behave well. They need to be disciplined. They need to have a Christian life modeled for them. They need to learn how to forgive others. They need to learn how to bear wrongs patiently. They need to learn how to subordinate inferior desires, like lusts and gluttony to higher desires, like the virtues. These things are not going to be done at a modern school, and it doesn’t even matter if it’s a public school, most of these things are not going to be done at a private school or a Christian school either. So if we’re concerned about the content of our children’s education, there’s not going to be a place where we can just send them and write a tuition check. So again, if we have desires to give our children a better education in terms of content, we’re going to have to take matters into our own hands and find a way to do that.
Thirdly, as parents, we’re not even concerned entirely with our children. We’re concerned with our own responsibility as parents. We’re concerned with doing God’s will for our own sake. And so we’re looking at the challenge of education and raising a family and providing for children and being good stewards of all of the resources, which include time and energy, not just money, being good stewards of all these resources to give the children an upbringing that is worthy of the Lord, that actually allows us to fulfill our duties as parents for our own sake. So that’s a third challenge.
So when you put all these things together, homeschooling in the 21st century often becomes a necessary reality. And I would argue that for most homeschooling families, those are the things that are driving them to homeschool. There are very few homeschool families that say our desire to homeschool is to provide our children with an elite education better than anything that can be found anywhere, and our homeschool is going to target the most selective, the most prestigious universities in the world. That’s usually not the goal of homeschooling. We’re usually concerned with salvation, with obedience, with being faithful, with keeping our children safe. We hear all the terrible stories about schools and teachers preying on children sexually, you know, grooming them and abusing them, pumping all kinds of immoral ideologies into their heads as kids and so on. We don’t want any of that near our children. That’s usually what drives us to consider homeschooling, and that’s necessary because the situation is bad in modern society.
So having said all of that, you know, we’re concerned about the spiritual formation of our children. We’re concerned about their health and safety, we’re concerned about their happiness, we’re concerned about our own duties as parents, and those are the things that we need to be able to focus on as parents. We need to be able to focus on those primary goals, primary motives for homeschooling, because they can easily be abandoned, and they often are abandoned once families get into homeschooling who really don’t know what they’re doing, because desires and expectations can just be out of control and crazy. There’s an endless supply of homeschooling products and all kinds of gimmicks and nonsense that you’re going to be flooded with as a parent, and it’s just very easy to lose sight of the original intention in homeschooling, we’ve got to have a realistic plan, and we’ve got to always keep the main thing the main thing, or we’ll get into all kinds of trouble.
So I think we need to start by talking about the end result, and then reverse engineer this whole homeschooling process, and let me just explain how simple a realistic set of expectations may be to implement in a homeschool. Here’s the goal for homeschooling. This is what I would like to present you, and I’m speaking practically as an educator. In homeschooling your children, you should have one goal, very, very simple, one goal. That goal should be this: to put your children at age 18, in a position where they have all options open to them, and they’ve got great opportunities for success in adult life. That should be the goal, to put your children in a position at age 18 where all options, vocationally, occupationally, are open to them. That’s the goal.
You don’t want to get into this nonsense of saying, I want my son to be a priest, because that’s not for you to choose. Or to say I want my child to be an engineer or to be a mathematician, or to do this, or to be a carpenter or to do what I do. None of that is your right as a parent to determine. One of the most important things to learn as a Catholic parent is that your children have the right to choose their own adult life for themselves. They get to choose whether they want to be married or not be married, they get to choose what sort of occupation they’re going to pursue, what kind of life they’re going to pursue. That is your children’s business, and they need to be given the freedom to make those decisions when they become adults. You don’t have a right as a parent to put your child on a path that you choose, as if those children are your own possessions or your own servants and so on.
Your children are born with the freedom to make their own adult choices, and those choices are none of your business. And so if you’re going to raise your children charitably and respectfully and within God’s will, you want to give them everything that they need to be in a position as young adults where they can make choices based on what they want to do, based on what their talents and interests lead them to want to do, based on what the circumstances of their lives in their generation require them to do. You want to put them in a position where all options are open so that they can be free to make choices that are best for them in their adult life. Is that not the most charitable thing that parents can do, to put their children in a position where all options are open to them as they enter young adulthood? It certainly is, and that should be our goal.
So again, the goal in our homeschooling, in our parenting, is to put our children in a position at age 18 where all options are open to them and they can make choices based on their own interests and abilities and desires and actually have the opportunity to do things that they desire to do. That’s the goal, that’s unselfish, charitable, generous parenting, and it’s also parenting according to God’s will, not seeing our children as some means for us to gain from or to live through, which is selfish parenting.
So that’s the goal in parenting. And now we’ve got to consider, you know, what are those options that we want to think about? What are these options that we want our children to have open to them when they enter adulthood? First of all, we want our children to have religious vocations open to them when they become adults. We want our children, if they’re inspired by God, to desire to enter into a religious vocation, to be a priest or a monk or a nun, a brother or sister. We want them to have that option open to them. We’re not going to set them on a path where it’s become a priest or bust, which many homeschool parents do, and it doesn’t work, but we want our children to have the option to choose religious life when they reach young adulthood. So that’s one thing to consider.
Secondly, we should consider military occupations. In the medieval world, there were three different kinds of lives. There was the life of religion, a life of military service, and a life of peasantry, or just manual labor. Not much is different today. It’s really the same thing. We’ve got religious vocations, military occupations, and then there’s just sort of civilian work as the third category. We would like for our children to have the option of military careers, which are very diverse. Military careers don’t mean being handed a machine gun and dropped off in a battlefield. Military careers include all sorts of occupations, from computing, medical care, all the way to infantry fighting, all kinds of technical engineering, all kinds of careers are included within the modern military. We want those options to be open.
There’s also different levels of military careers. There’s reserves, which is part time military service, there’s active duty, which is full time. There’s ROTC, which is officer training in the university. There’s lots of different options that provide for all kinds of different interests, careers, lifestyles, future opportunities and so on. And it’s a big part of modern culture. So keeping the military career option open for our children is important.
And then thirdly, civilian careers or secular occupations. We want to put our children in a position where whatever occupation they’re interested in, whether it’s an academic position, professional position, a trade, whatever it may be, we would like them to be in a position where they can pursue that successfully.
So those are the kinds of things that we need to think about as we’re training our children, and our parenting and educating them and training them should all be directed by the golden rule, which says that we should do for our children what we would like for our parents to do for us. That’s the golden rule in parenting, to do for our children what we would like our parents to do for us if we were them.
So as we think about these options, we should ask the question, well, okay, so we know the goal. The goal is to put our children into a position at age 18 where all these options are open to them. And let me just pause here for a second, obviously, by talking about these options, I’m not discounting other options, like a young girl may say, I don’t want any of those things. I would like to get married and be a housewife and mother. I’m not saying anything against that. So when I talk about these options, please don’t think that I’m saying, you know, everybody’s got to go have a career, everybody’s got to get out of the house. Everybody’s got to go and pursue money and career success. I’m not saying that. I’m talking about keeping doors open, keeping options open, so children can choose from all of the options based on their own unique interests as they become adults. That’s my point.
So now that we have those options in mind, we have to ask ourselves, what do I need to do as a homeschooling parent? What do I need to do in order to put my child in that position? What do I need to do to put my child in that position?
And I’m going to say that there are three objectives in homeschooling, three objectives in homeschooling, and all of these are within the power of parents. Three objectives in homeschooling, and these are all within the power of the parents. So this is practical and realistic. This is possible, this is measurable. This isn’t crazy nonsense talk.
Three objectives. Number one, raise your child to be confirmed in the Catholic Church. Number one, raise your child to be confirmed in the Catholic Church. That’s number one. Number two, raise your child to receive a high school diploma. Raise your child to receive a high school diploma. And number three, raise your child to be physically healthy as he or she enters young adulthood. Those three objectives I would like to present as the objectives that homeschooled parents who have no idea what they are doing should direct all of their attention to. All three of these things are in your power.
Now, when I say physical health, obviously, if a child is born with some physical defect or has some sort of unavoidable physical disease that’s not in our control, but that’s normally not the case. I’m talking normal circumstances. I’m talking avoiding problems physically that should be and could be avoided. Putting our children in a position as they enter young adulthood where all options are open to them.
Military careers, for example, are going to require a certain level of physical ability, a certain level of physical health. There’s a physical obstacle that has to be crossed in order to enter into military careers. The same is true of religious vocations. General health is going to be required for a religious vocation. And then in the civilian business world, we’re going to have to work hard. We’re going to have to be able to grind and compete in a competitive, capitalistic marketplace. Our children need to be physically healthy when they reach adulthood.
So those three objectives — confirmation in the Catholic Church, a high school diploma, and good physical health — those should be our objectives in homeschooling, if you have no idea what you’re doing and you want to put your child in a position at age 18, entering into young adulthood, where they have the whole world open to them, and they can discern, based on their own interests and abilities, what vocation they feel God is calling them to, or what vocation they would like to pursue.
They will have the opportunity to do that because they’ve been put in a position where all options are open to them. And in modern society, especially if you’re in America, this is very easy to do. It’s very easy in America to put your children in a position at age 18 where all of these options are open to them.
Now you may ask, especially if you know other homeschool families, if this is so easy, why do so many families fail? And I can give you a good example: the U.S. military, which has full time careers available to as many young adults as desire them, struggles to recruit. One of the reasons is because the children, the 18 year olds, are too dumb. They don’t even have a basic education. They don’t have sufficient learning to pass the ASVAB, which is the entrance test for the military, and qualify for all of these military careers and opportunities that are available. That’s the first problem, and the ASVAB is not difficult, it’s a general standardized test, but the kids are simply not educated well enough to pass even the basic entrance examination.
Secondly, children are too out of shape, too unhealthy, too wimpy to be willing to go through basic training to get into military shape, and so they avoid the military because of the physical challenge, where if children are raised fit and healthy, that should be the least of their concerns. To be an 18 year old and know that you’ve got to get through basic training and you have a military career with college expenses paid and all that available to you, and the obstacle is physical training — that shouldn’t be a concern for a healthy young adult.
The other issue that hinders recruiting is that kids have criminal records by the time they’re 18 years old, and they’re disqualified because of crimes that they’ve committed, and then you’ve got other problems like tattoos and drugs and things like that that also disqualify kids. But in American society, for all of the resources that are available and for all of the talk, kids are not put in a position where they avoid these troubles and can qualify for military service, and the same is true for other areas of life.
So the objectives are not difficult. What puts children in danger in almost all circumstances is that parents go into this work of homeschooling with unrealistic expectations. They fail to accomplish these minimum requirements or basic objectives because their arrogance leads them to aim too high and get into things that they shouldn’t even be talking about.
When I say that these objectives are simple, that it’s easy to actually accomplish these things, I mean that it’s easy. The danger is unrealistic expectations getting entangled in all kinds of nonsense and actually screwing up the kids’ childhood and education, trying to do things that you shouldn’t even be talking about.
And I’ll give you an example. We see many parents — and I’ll talk about this more in a little bit — signing kids up for all kinds of sports and extracurricular activities. And if you ask them, why are you doing this? Why do you have this kid signed up for winter baseball league? Why do you have this kid signed up for three different instrument lessons and all of these activities and camps and this? The parents will say things like, “Oh, well, in order to get admitted to a selective college, you need to have a full resume of activities. You need to show them that you’re active, that you’re well rounded, that you’ve got lots of skills and interest, and you’re not lazy and so on.” And that’s all false. That’s all false. There is no college anywhere that’s looking for kids with lots of activities.
But you’ll find parents running all over the place with kids in all kinds of activities saying it’s for college, it’s for college, it’s for college, and that’s just objectively false. So there’s all kinds of errors that are made. There’s all kinds of wives’ tales and rumors and hearsay talk about what’s needed for college and career, and that’s what parents are doing, and it’s false. And I’ll talk more about that in a minute.
So we’ve got to know what we’re doing. It’s not complicated. And in American society, it’s very easy to do these things. The danger is arrogantly, ambitiously reaching too high.
If we focus on these necessary objectives and we’ve got a gifted, motivated kid, it’s very easy to allow that kid to reach higher. That’s very easy if we have a gifted, motivated individual child who wants to do more, who wants to study and reach higher, who wants to train to be more fit, who wants to pursue more religion. If we have a child who has interests to do more, that’s a good problem to have, and it’s very easy to provide for such a child.
The reality, however, is that that’s normally not going to be the case. Normally, the ambitious, motivated ones are the parents, and they’re trying to force their children to do things that their children don’t even understand, have no interest in, because it’s the parents’ ambition and it’s the parents’ desire. And the parents are driven to try to make their kids these little show poodles that they can show off to their friends. And that causes parents to actually lose those essential objectives in the long run.
So that’s the danger that I think we need to especially avoid, and this is especially true for young parents who are very confident in themselves. They may be motivated themselves. They may be spiritually minded. They may be in great physical shape. They may love working out and exercising. They may love studying. They may be academic. They may be successful in school. They may be successful in their profession. And they think they’re just going to reproduce themselves and raise copies of themselves.
And very often young parents who think that reproduction includes the reproduction of character and interests and abilities have a lot to learn, and they make lots of painful mistakes. So what I’m saying is: by understanding these three essential objectives, focusing on these things, because these are your actual duties as a parent, focus on these three essential objectives and know that if you have a child that’s special, gifted, motivated, it’s no problem to help a motivated child accomplish more.
But if you’re the one who’s ambitious, if you’re the one who wants to do more, you’re going to end up costing your children these essential objectives while you play some crazy game trying to drag them into all sorts of things that they’re not interested in. So that’s my warning to young parents.
So let’s talk about these three objectives and how they can actually be accomplished. First of all, we need to raise our children to be confirmed in the Catholic Church. Our duty as Catholic parents is to initiate — and that’s a key word. You should take a permanent marker and write it on your hand. Initiate. Initiate. Your job as a parent is not to raise a saint. It’s not to make a saint. Your duty as a parent is to initiate your children into the Catholic life.
Think about it. When your children are born, you are taught by the Church to bring them to baptism. Why? Because in order to have original sins forgiven and washed away, they need to be baptized. The children are not making the decision to do that. The parents are making the decision to do that. Why? Because the parents are called upon by the Church to initiate their children into the Catholic life. Therefore it’s reasonable to bring them to baptism, because baptism is a rite of initiation into the Catholic life, into the Catholic Church.
Parents bring their children to church. They bring their children to Mass, they bring their children to faith formation, they bring their children to first confession and First Communion. They initiate them into the faith. They have the right and responsibility to do that. They’re not making their children Catholics. They’re not raising saints. They’re not raising priests or monks or nuns. None of that is the parent’s responsibility. Initiating the children into the Catholic life is the parent’s responsibility.
That begins at baptism, continues through all of their formation and sacramental participation, obeying the precepts of the Church, modeling the Catholic life, teaching the Catholic faith to the children as they grow up, and then, last of all, leading the child to confirmation, where the Church essentially says to the parents, “thank you, you’ve done your job. Now it’s the child’s responsibility.”
So the goal for parents is to lead their children to confirmation, and we can do that with the guidance and direction of our priests, of our spiritual directors, following their instructions as our children grow up.
So step one, like I said, is getting the children baptized, bringing the children with us to Mass, participating in the life of the parish, initiating our children into the parish life. That’s our duty as parents. When our children reach six, seven years old, following the Church’s directions for sacramental preparation, whatever our pastor says is to be done, following those instructions, preparing our children, catechizing our children, helping our children to be properly disposed to receive the sacraments at the appropriate time, under the direction and with the approval of our pastors.
Again, initiation. And then after first confession and communion is received, continue bringing the children to church, bringing the children into the life of the parish community, catechizing the children, preparing them for the Sacrament of Confirmation.
And then at confirmation, which begins to engage with the will of the child as an independent, bringing them to the point where they are disposed favorably to the Church, the Church recognizes that proper formation and disposition and confers upon them the Sacrament of Confirmation, which is like the award of Catholic parenting that’s within our power as Catholic parents.
It takes place normally ages 14, 15, 16, in the first half of high school, bringing our children to receive the Sacrament of Confirmation, to literally — and think about this and appreciate this — to receive the Holy Spirit through the Sacrament of Confirmation from the bishop of the Church, or one appointed by the bishop. You can give that to your children. You can give your children the sacramental grace of baptism, of making confession, of receiving Communion, of receiving confirmation. Almost all of that is in your power as a parent, and notice that all of it is done before the age when the child becomes independent.
So the first objective is to lead your children to the Sacrament of Confirmation within your power. Very simple. Not difficult. So that’s objective number one.
Objective number two: lead your child to a high school diploma. Your child does not need to get admitted to Harvard at age 18. Your kids, when they receive a high school diploma, can also join the military. They don’t have to go active duty, they don’t have to go to Iraq. They can join the military in the reserves, go to basic training, choose a career, receive the training for that career, and come back home and go to college and have the military pay for their college education. They can come home from basic training and what’s called AIT, advanced individual training. They can come home, have the military pay for their college, and join ROTC, and when they graduate, have an officer career in the military waiting for them. There are so many options. If you have a high school diploma, that’s all that’s necessary.
You’re not going to be able to control your child’s adult life, because when they become legally independent, they’re free to do whatever they want. Your duty as a parent is to put them in position where they have all options open: to initiate them into the Catholic faith and to provide them with a healthy strength, building courage, building life as they grow up. If you do that as a parent, you will have done everything that you can do for that child.
The problem is that your child at 18, once he gains that independence, he’s going to start making bad decisions, and he’s going to lose certain opportunities, certain doors are going to close, certain windows are going to close, and that’s just God’s providence.
But as a parent, you can provide your child with confirmation in the Catholic Church. That’s not difficult. Within your power. You can provide your child with a high school diploma. It’s not difficult. Within your power. And you can raise a child who’s healthy and physically strong. That is not difficult. Within your power.
If you do those three things, your child, as he enters adulthood, will be in a position where the whole world is open to him, and he’ll have the opportunity to choose whatever path he wants because they’ll all be open. And that’s really all that you can do. From that point on, you’re just a counselor. You’re just a counselor. Once your child reaches adulthood, you’re no longer a controller. You’re just a counselor.
If you’re a homeschooling parent and you don’t know what to do, that’s my advice. Don’t waste your time setting higher goals or expectations than that, because if your children are motivated and all things go well, there’s no problem adding stuff. But don’t ever leave that path for talk about higher achievements and then risk achieving even that basic set of objectives.
Be careful of arrogance and unrealistic expectations, because real life is hard. I tell my kids all the time: it’s hard to do anything because we never know what the circumstances are going to be. We never know what’s going to happen. We never know if our health is going to continue. We never know how things are going to get turned upside down. Always make sure you’re getting the essentials done, and if you do that, adding stuff is easy, but focus on the essentials.
That’s what I would advise homeschooling parents with the right motives, with the right goals, who don’t know what they’re doing and want to give their children the best upbringing they can: those three objectives — Catholic confirmation, high school diploma, physical health.
If you do those three things, you’ll accomplish the goal of putting your young adult child in a position where all options are open to him. That’s the goal of parenting and homeschooling.
I know that raises 1000 other practical questions and issues. I’m happy to talk about all of them. If there’s anything I can help you with, if there’s anything else you want to talk about, you’ve got practical questions, want to dig into the details, just let me know. I’m happy to do that.
But I think that this is a reliable guide for parenting and homeschooling. Real world, real life, no nonsense, no homeschool marketing nonsense. Honest talk from one Catholic homeschooling father to other Catholic homeschooling parents. I’m happy to help in any way I can. Just get in touch. You can reach me by writing to mail at classicalliberalarts.com and as I said, our program, the Classical Liberal Arts Academy, is designed for this very purpose, to allow parents to satisfy all these requirements and to pursue higher things if the kids are motivated. So if you’d like to join us in the academy, you can do so for free. Just visit the website at classicalliberalarts.com. If you have any questions, get in touch. I hope that’s helpful.
God bless you.
Mr. William C. Michael, O.P.
Headmaster
Classical Liberal Arts Academy
