Questions About Home-Schooling

QUESTIONS ABOUT HOME-SCHOOLING

Mary Kay Clark

Answered in response to a question posed on CRNET.

Where you can obtain basic information about how home schooling works?

Books, usually by individual parents who have done it, are available at your local public library, and also in Christian bookstores. There are also a number of magazines being published, both by Christian and secular people. The two I consider most practical are The Teaching Home, A Christian Magazine for Home Educators, Box 20219, Portland, OR 97220, or phone 503-253-9633, or FAX 503-253-7345. And the other is Homeschooling Today, Practical Help for Christian Families. Write P.O. Box 1425, Melrose, FL 32666.

How to do it in a Catholic Home?

First I would recommend my book Catholic Home Schooling, A Handbook for Parents, available from Seton Home Study, 1350 Progress Drive, Front Royal, VA 22630; 540-636-9990.

Catholic Home Schooling Magazines available: 

The Catholic Family's Magnificat
P.O. Box 43-1015
Pontiac, MI 48343-1015 

and 

The Catholic Home Educator
P.O. Box 420225
San Diego, CA 92142.

In addition, I would recommend that you and your wife begin to attend local Catholic support group meetings. These are fairly easy to find by simply asking around, but if you let me know the state in which you are located, I can put you in touch with a state or local Catholic group.

These support group meetings would give your wife an idea of the problems parents have but also how they are solving them. You ask about "social interaction." When you attend these meetings, you will discover that home schooling families have many social activities, though the Catholic groups tend to focus on church related activities, such as First Friday devotions, visits to shrines, picketing abortion clinics, Pilgrim Virgin processions, May crownings, and so on.

You ask how home schooling compares with public and private schools. In the home school, the child can obtain an education. Achievement test scores prove that children taught at home school score an average of 30 percentile points higher than children taught in a classroom.

In the home school, the child is not daily exposed to the serious problems children face today in the schools: guns, knives, drugs, sexual activity, witchcraft, the NEA-promoted politically correct agenda regarding homosexuality, early sex and use of condoms, feminism, anti-patriotic ideas, new age, Goals 2000, group therapy on suicide, personal and family analysis, and so on ad nauseam.

By the way, seminaries are reporting that a high percentage of vocations are coming from the home school families. Catholic home school families tend to live the Catholic lifestyle more fully, attending Mass almost daily, saying the daily rosary, participating in the liturgical year with various activities, making their home truly the Domestic Church.

In Christ, Mary Kay Clark