Another Argument in Favor of Home-Schooling

Excerpt from The Man Who Got Even With God, by M. Raymond, O.C.S.O.

Education,

to be real, must be synonymous with edification.

Its whole purpose must be to "bring out" and to 'build up' the man that is buried in the boy, and build him up to the gigantic stature of Jesus Christ.

Secular education is not and cannot be education, because a man can never be educated unless he is "brought out" and led to God. The modern public school system, from kindergarten to state university, may teach a man how to make a living but it will never teach him how to make a life, and until man knows how to make a life, he is not educated.

Do understand me; I know that the laboratories of our schools and colleges are wonderlands of marvel and mystery.

It is a good thing to have gone through them; for it is a very good thing to know about physical and chemical changes; but it is much better to know about transubstantiation, for that is higher than any physical or chemical change; that is a miracle. It is a good thing to study biology and go in for physical hygiene, but it is far better to study what biology cannot teach – the birth of our God from a Virgin – and to go in for spiritual hygiene. It is a good thing to have studied the humanities, but it would have been far better to have studied the Divinity. To know the epics and the sagas of literature is a grand thing, but the saga of all sagas is that of the human family; and that is not taught in our learned literary circles, and the greatest of all epics – those of Creation and Redemption – are either unknown or ignored. Secular education teaches about the stars and the planets, and that is a good thing; but it does not teach about "our home beyond the stars" and about the maker of the planets, and that is a very bad thing! For the first without the second might be knowledge, the first with the second is wisdom. Until we aim at this wisdom in all our teachings, we will ever be the "blind leading the blind" – and that combination never has a happy ending.

It is the catechism that is the golden book of the world’s sublimest wisdom; it is the only true dream maker and character builder; for it is the textbook of all textbooks, man's very guide to God.v