“Are we doing school today?” my son asked me. I looked at him curiously, because we don’t use the term “school” much at all in our home.
“We’ll do some lessons and reading,” I replied.
Such moments remind me of the difference between “school” and “education.” We don’t often ask: How will you educate your children? Rather it’s usually, Will you homeschool or send your kids to school? If the latter, will you choose a private, classical, Christian, or public school (if you even have all those options in your area)?
I admit I don’t like this question. According to the state, we’re currently homeschoolers. That is, the home is the center of our civic education, and my kids don’t learn their three r’s primarily from an institution, but from my husband and me.
Perhaps a better term would be that we are home-based educators. We don’t “unschool” because we don’t have schooling to unschool from. And my kids have other lessons from the best teachers I can find and afford, sometimes in a formal setting (right now my daughter is taking ballet at a community center), sometimes informal (my kids have learned a lot about local food, and the farm cycle through spending time with extended family and talking with folks at the farmers’ market, and about Shakespeare from listening to us read and discuss plays with friends). A friend or family member here and there will tell them a fairy tale, a story from history, or a tip on whittling or crocheting.
In the evenings lately our dinner table conversations have involved lots of begging for family stories (especially from my husband), requests to tell stories in Latin (again, my husband’s specialty) or simply to tell them more about something that’s seized their attention. “Frogs!” one night. “Snakes!” another. The other day, after a day of lessons at home and away, my kids begged my husband for some family lore, which led to a spontaneous lesson on how to take care of an injured person in an emergency, followed by a request to do a bedtime story in Latin.
I plan a lot of lessons, but they’re pretty low-key, and we observe the liturgical and seasonal calendar as best we can (hopefully better each year), and I’m always on the lookout for beautiful music, stories, records, books, to show them. I’m always putting books on hold through interlibrary loan and looking out for books to add to our home library.
We practice noticing what’s around us: the crocuses coming up for spring, the birdsong (and working on identifying more than just the bluejay, robin, and chickadee). When we host—dinners or music nights or poetry readings—our kids help with the food, dishes, and conversation. During morning prayer and Scripture reading, often a thorny theological question will come up, and we’ll spend some time talking about fighting sin, getting demons angry, what angels are, why people do bad things when they don’t want to, and why some people don’t go to church.
It’s all education.
But if we sent our children to a private or public school five days a week from 8 to 3, we still would be home-based educators. Our children would still be fundamentally formed by our home culture and liturgy. We would still be their parents, directing their education, though delegating certain tasks in a different way from how we do it at present.
Currently my daughter has been in two choirs, at church and a local classical school, takes classes in nature study and etiquette at our homeschool cooperative, goes to ballet and violin lessons once a week at a community center and university, speaks Latin with my husband, crochets with her aunt, and rides horses with her cousins when we visit them in the Midwest. I’m constantly on the lookout for opportunities for continuing their living education—that is, for them to continually grow in wisdom and courage, and in the skills and abilities that will enable them to live a full life.
Some of these things depend on our particular family situation and the opportunities we encounter: for instance, my daughters are less likely to become competent seamstresses—an ability I believe would serve them well—unless I find enough outside help in teaching them, since I do not qualify even as an incompetent one. My older brother’s children have horses at home, and unless we move out of the city and acquire some horses ourselves (something my children are rather open to), their cousins will be more likely to grow up into cowboys than they.
And that’s okay. Each of us is going to be shaped by the place we’re in, and we each have places and gifts to steward. In our own context, I have some high schools in mind for my children, as well as different apprenticeship ideas, depending on their interests and needs, and our own family situation, when the time comes. But always the question of “school” is secondary, at best, to the question of education—that is, of the formation of character, ability, relationships, and virtue. “Don’t let school interfere with your education,” my schoolteacher dad, recalling Mark Twain, told me and my siblings time and again. I’d like that mindset to stick with my own children—and I’d also like them not to let “homeschool” interfere with their education either.
This is why I think the debate within Christian circles of public vs. private vs. homeschool is tired and often unhelpful. If we recognized that parents are, after the Holy Spirit, their children’s primary educators, and then recognize that a full human life is nurtured within the home and family and then expands to neighborhood, church, village, and beyond, then, perhaps, our discussions would be on firmer footing. How ought a human person be formed for a flourishing life? Answering that question, in our different situations and contexts, given our different opportunities and gifts as parents and communities, will, and ought, guide us. “Schooling,” especially the strictures of modern compulsory education, and all the hoops one must jump through, is only part of the picture.
G.K. Chesterton wrote, “Philosophy is not the concern of those who pass through Divinity and Greats, but of those who pass through birth and death.” We may say, then, “Philosophy of education is not the concern of those with education degrees, or those who homeschool their children, or those who teach public school, or those who are headmasters of classical schools…but of those who wish for a good, full, virtuous life for themselves, their neighbors, and their descendants.”
How do we learn to live? That’s the question of education—what we could call the school of life. Parents, then, need to be philosophers—lifelong lovers of wisdom and students of human nature. This is not a task for teacher parents, nor for literary or artsy parents, but for all of us as persons.
How do we learn virtue—i.e., become like Christ? How do we cultivate good habits, in the nitty gritty everyday? These are not “homeschool” or “classical education” questions. Rather, they are human ones.
Originally published in the spring 2025 Mere Orthodoxy print journal. To become a member and receive future issues, join today.
