"Parents have the first responsibility for the education of their children. They bear witness to this responsibility first by creating a home where tenderness, forgiveness, respect, fidelity, and disinterested service are the rule.

The home is well suited for education in the virtues. This requires an apprenticeship in self-denial, sound judgment, and self-mastery - the preconditions of all true freedom.

Parents should teach their children to subordinate the 'material and instinctual dimensions to interior and spiritual ones.'

 Parents have a grave responsibility to give good example to their children. By knowing how to acknowledge their own failings to their children, parents will be better able to guide and correct them." ***

     Is this a quote from a school handbook?   No, but maybe it should be!  Parent's need to know they have a core responsibility for the education of their children.    "Do as  I say, not as I do,"  reverberates hypocricy with kids.    Where did I find this instructive guide to parental responsibilities?  This is the Catechism of the Catholic Church exhorting parents in the accountability and duties  inherent in raising children. 

     Home educators claim a large portion of this responsibility as their own.   But traditional schools need to find meaningful ways to coach school parents in their core responsibilities in the educational process of their children.  I've met too many parents who turn their kids over to the educational system and expect the system to take full responsibility for character development,  life skills,  and the moral choices of their kids.   Parents and their chosen educational associates  must  become partners in education.....for the children's sake.

***  CCC 2223

featured in the 74th Carnival of Education

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Posted by shaunms

Have you read Thomas Groome's Educating for Life. I admit, I have not been able to make myself go cover to cover, but I thought of it because he has that same quotation in the earlier part of the book. I really want to read it to get some good, Catholic-grounded, thought on what whole-person, whole-life education really is.

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