Parent-Directed Private Education

The Classical Liberal Arts Academy’s Answer to the Homeschooling Dilemma

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The Dilemma

Every serious Catholic family has been handed the same false choice: teach your children yourself, or surrender them to a school.

The first option promises freedom and delivers exhaustion. The second promises expertise and delivers a system that answers to everyone but the family. Parents have been told these are the only two roads. They are not.

I have worked with homeschooling families for eighteen years and homeschooled my own children for more than twenty-six. I have watched both roads fail the students who walk them. This article names a third road, explains why it works, and invites families to take it.

Why Both Answers Fail

Do-it-yourself homeschooling fails because no one can teach what he has not learned. Parents are asked to be master of every subject, for every child, every year. Few have studied Latin, logic or Euclid. Fewer have time to learn them while running a household. The result is predictable: curricula bought in boxes, checklists in place of understanding, and anxious attention to appearances. Parents are not to blame. They were given a task no one could carry.

Common schooling fails because it takes the child from the parents. North Carolina’s own law makes this plain. A home school is defined as one where the parents “determine the scope and sequence of the academic instruction” and “determine additional sources of academic instruction” (G.S. 115C-563). By that definition, in every other school someone else decides. Parents choose the school once, at the door, and surrender the rest.

One road keeps the parents’ authority but loses expert guidance. The other keeps expert guidance but loses the parents’ authority. Each fails at exactly what the other gets right.

A Radical Solution

Parent-Directed Private Education (PDPE) keeps both goods and drops both failures. The parents keep their authority. The student does the studying. A qualified tutor directs and supports his study.

It is radical in the true sense of the word: it goes back to the root (radix). Before the age of mass schooling, the noble and the devout educated their children this way. The father directed; the child studied; the tutor guided his study and examined his work. Quintilian, in the first book of his Institutio Oratoria, already weighs private instruction at home against public instruction in schools. What is new is the name, and the means: online study, AI-assisted assessment and a local office now make private education affordable for ordinary families.

PDPE is not a better homeschool curriculum, and it is not a cheaper school. It is a different arrangement of authority and study.

Definition

Parent-Directed Private Education is home education in which parents retain authority over the child’s course of study while delegating specialized academic instruction to professional educators.

The term is built as a classical definition. The genus is parent-directed education, which places PDPE under the law as home education. The difference is private education, meaning instruction by a master, which separates it from do-it-yourself homeschooling.

In do-it-yourself homeschooling, parents both direct and teach, and the plan of study is improvised or bought as a package. In common schooling, the institution directs, hired teachers teach the class, and the plan is standardized. In Parent-Directed Private Education, parents direct, the student studies on a plan customized for him, and a tutor directs and supports his study by the parents’ delegation.

The Persons

PDPE stabilizes a student’s education by binding together the persons responsible for it. Pius XI taught in Divini Illius Magistri that education belongs to the family and civil society in the natural order and to the Church in the supernatural order. PDPE gives each its proper place.

  • The parents direct: they set the ends, approve the course of study, and choose the sources of instruction.
  • The tutor directs and supports the student: he assigns and examines his study and helps him wherever he struggles, by the parents’ delegation.
  • The student studies, and no arrangement substitutes for his own devotion.
  • The priest sanctifies and guides: he supplies the sacraments, spiritual direction and help in discerning a vocation.

Parents, tutor and student form a triangle, the only rigid figure in geometry; each relationship checks the other two. The priest adds a third dimension. Four points joined each to each form a tetrahedron, the simplest rigid solid. The figure holds only if every person knows every other: the priest must know the tutor and the student, not only the family.

Render to Caesar

PDPE pays the law exactly what it is owed, and no more. “Render to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, and to God the things that are God’s” (Matthew 22:21). What belongs to Caesar is what the law lawfully demands: attendance, required subjects, records. The common good does not belong to Caesar. It belongs to God.

Modern schools fail here. They do not treat the law’s demands as a debt to be paid and finished. They make the law their end and hand it the whole school day, and nothing is left for God or for the student’s soul.

The market is not Caesar at all. Its demands are hypothetical: if a student is called to medicine, then medicine’s qualifications follow. They are taken on after a vocation is discerned, as means to it, never before it as an end. The order of PDPE is therefore:

  1. First the law, satisfied as a debt of justice.
  2. Then liberal formation, the good of every student whatever his calling.
  3. Then vocational discernment, under parents, tutor and priest.
  4. Last, the market’s requirements, met efficiently once the vocation is known.

You must be just before you can be generous. Justice comes first, and then the liberal arts, the education fit for the free man, can be given freely.

What PDPE Is Not

PDPE is home education under the law, not a private school in disguise. The family remains the school. Parents register it, keep its records, determine its scope and sequence, and choose the Academy as an additional source of instruction, exactly as North Carolina’s statute allows.

  • It is not a hybrid or university-model school. There is no shared class schedule, and each student’s plan is his own.
  • It is not remedial help. The tutor does not patch gaps in someone else’s program; he directs the student’s whole course of study.
  • It is not a curriculum in a box. Materials are only the first step; the student’s study, its assessment and the tutor’s personal guidance are the substance.

How the Academy Serves PDPE

PDPE is the exclusive service of the Classical Liberal Arts Academy’s Academy Student plan. The Academy is accredited by Cognia, and it treats its accountability to the law, to its accreditor, to receiving institutions and to families as its own debt of justice.

The service follows four steps:

  1. The Academy provides the study materials of the classical liberal arts.
  2. Parents and students complete the assigned study at home, following a weekly plan customized for each student and approved by the parents.
  3. The Academy assesses the study through quizzes and written work, online or at the Academy office.
  4. The Academy provides tutoring, where needed, after assessment.

Families near Monroe, North Carolina, can visit the Academy office by appointment for assessment and tutoring. Families elsewhere receive the same service online. The Academy keeps exact records and transcripts, so the student’s legal and academic obligations are met in full, and no more time than necessary is spent on them.

An Invitation

Parents no longer have to choose between doing everything themselves and giving everything away. They can keep their authority and still give their children a real tutor to direct and support their study.

If you want your children formed in the classical liberal arts, you want their education ordered to God rather than to the market, and you are open to whatever vocation He gives them, PDPE was made for your family. Schedule a free consultation with the Academy and we will begin with your goals for your child, not ours.

Mr. William C. Michael, OP
Headmaster
Classical Liberal Arts Academy

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