Posted on 10/15/2022 8:30:56 AM PDT by DoodleBob
SÃO PAULO – Facing opposition from both the Brazilian bishops and the National Association of Catholic Education, conservative Christian groups are pressuring President Jair Bolsonaro and lawmakers to legalize homeschooling.
Brazil’s Supreme Court ruled in 2018 that although homeschooling was possible, specific legislation was necessary to allow it.
Seeking a second term in elections scheduled for next month, Bolsonaro has met with advocates of homeschooling on two different occasions since the end of August.
It is estimated that around 30,000 families in Brazil educate their children at home, despite the legal ambiguity surrounding the practice.
Without specific legal protection, they risk being charged by the authorities with the intellectual neglect of their children.
In May, a homeschooling bill endorsed by Bolsonaro passed in the Chamber of Deputies, but still must be approved in the Senate.
Although the Catholic Church in other countries has been supportive of homeschooling – or at least neutral on the subject – the church in Brazil has been firmly opposed to the legislation.
According to Ascânio Sedrez, an experienced principal of Catholic schools in São Paulo and a member of the National Association of Catholic Education (ANEC), homeschooling “is a bad idea on several levels and seems especially inappropriate in the current Brazilian situation.”
“We have just witnessed firsthand how most families clearly were not able to handle the learning process of their children at home during the pandemic. Now those people want to take education to families again,” Sedrez told Crux. Indeed, educational assessment data released by the government on Sept. 16 showed that the COVID-19 pandemic had a brutal impact on the literacy development of elementary school students. Experts fear the possible consequences of such deficiencies for future learning.
Sedrez argued that the Bolsonaro administration has been continually dismantling previously consolidated educational policies with the aim of “reducing costs with schools and opening the way for their privatization.”
Homeschooling in that sense is, at the same time, an excuse for Bolsonaro’s free market agenda and a way of “showing to his constituents that he is a pro-family president, given that he supports the rights of families to educate their children at home,” he said.
Although homeschooling is mostly supported by Evangelicals and Pentecostals, many conservative and traditionalist Catholics also prefer educating their children at home.
In the politically charged scenario in Brazil since Bolsonaro’s election in 2018, many conservative Catholics have been increasingly suspicious of schools, frequently perceived as places of ideological indoctrination by left-wing groups. That has been a top reason for the new interest in homeschooling.
“Schools combat mostly the Catholic Church and its 2,000-year thought. It is sad to see that the episcopate is aligned against the possibility of a truly Catholic education for our children,” said Ricardo Silva, father of a one-year-old son.
For two years, he and his wife have been members of the Society of Saint Pius X, a traditionalist fraternity founded by Archbishop Michel Lefebvre in 1970 that is in irregular communion with the Vatican. Silva is worried about secular education, “which attacks the church and struggles against its doctrine, at the same time relativizing the knowledge in several areas,” he said.
“The most important thing about homeschooling is that I will be able to teach my son about the church doctrine the way it used to be taught till 60 or 70 years ago. Besides, learning at home is faster and more efficient than learning at school,” Silva said.
He said that he does not fear his son will lose anything by not going to school because his family is able to provide a good environment for socialization.
“I believe families should have the right to teach their children at home,” he said.
Sedrez said homeschooling “appears for some people as a way of preserving a Catholic identity that has been perverted by the world.”
“But it is part of an ideology that opposes public schools and universities. It opposes everything that can lead to emancipation,” he added.
Many private companies have been giving signs that they are ready to get into the market of educational systems to help families in homeschooling.
“They know there is money in it. Many of those families have financial conditions of hiring a tutor. It is really an elitist project,” Sedrez said.
Auxiliary Bishop Joaquim Mol Guimarães of Belo Horizonte, one of the members of the episcopate who has been following the debate on homeschooling over the past few years, argued that it is never a good solution, given that it disregards relevant economic disparities in society.
“That is a rather excluding and elitist project that may have terrible consequences if the poor end up being put aside – like they are in other aspects,” he told Crux. Guimarães, who is the president of the Pontifical Catholic University of Minas Gerais, stressed that both families and schools have fundamental roles in the learning process, but “schools can at times supplant the families that lack the conditions to adequately offer the basic elements of education.”
“Schools have an indispensable relevance because they put children side by side, something that is primordial for human development in learning projects guided by well-prepared teachers,” he said.
Sedrez emphasized that a truly Christian educational perspective has to consider that “ours is a gregarious species, so education must be a collective experience.”
“Besides, Catholics need to be educated for common life – in community and in society as a whole,” he said.
The parents’ ability to properly teach their children is another concern among education experts in Brazil.
According to Guimarães, good teachers are trained to help students think about reality and its meaning.
“We cannot be sure that family members, even though they have studied to have a career in this or that field, have the conditions and the pedagogical resources necessary to teach all subjects,” he said.
2223 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." 31 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:
He who loves his son will not spare the rod.... He who disciplines his son will profit by him. 32
Fathers, do not provoke your children to anger, but bring them up in the discipline and instruction of the Lord. 33
2224 The home is the natural environment for initiating a human being into solidarity and communal responsibilities. Parents should teach children to avoid the compromising and degrading influences which threaten human societies.
2225 Through the grace of the sacrament of marriage, parents receive the responsibility and privilege of evangelizing their children. Parents should initiate their children at an early age into the mysteries of the faith of which they are the "first heralds" for their children. They should associate them from their tenderest years with the life of the Church. 34 A wholesome family life can foster interior dispositions that are a genuine preparation for a living faith and remain a support for it throughout one's life.
Ping
They should hire a canon lawyer and persue ecclesiastical redress to the Vatican.
A point to ponder.
Not all home schools are equal. It is not the type of organization that determines the outcome. It is what is done in the organization.
How many here are in favor of Muslim home schools in the US?
I can’t imagine why I don’t go to church anymore. Just a bunch of solid decisions by all over the last couple decades.
As far as I’m concerned, the church & belief reside in one’s mind. I don’t need another flawed human in a specific building telling me what to think or believe.
Same with religious schools, public schools, ect.
My take is what is most efficient?
We’re entering an age where large bureaucracies and their problems can be be vompeted against in the benefits the institutions provide.
When someone can get the same skills at home, can it be justified to continuously prop up a bigger institution? Is that competative?
To the Argentine communist Pope run Vatican?
Damned stupid socialist. Maybe its exactly the bloated government educrat bureaucracy which is preserving "relevant economic disparities."
“How many here are in favor of Muslim home schools in the US?”
It’s their right.
It’s meaningless what I am in favor of.
When someone can get the same skills at home, can it be justified to continuously prop up a bigger institution? Is that competative?
Again, we may like our idea of home school.
But there are other ideas.
Understand the full situation and we should not think there are magic easy answers.
You are not wrong - but understand, the Catholic Church allows freedom of thought and debate on temporal issues. Popes and Bishops are certainly not infallible on such things and no one ever demands you believe they are. You can respect the office, but disagree with the man.
The Catholic Church is the word of God, the Sacraments given by Jesus, and sacred tradition. That exists well beyond any particular man.
Once I realized these things, I was much happier in my Faith.
I am.
I also favor the right to keep and bear arms, the right to free speech, the right to be secure in my persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizure, and the balance of the Bill of Rights.
I dislike idiots opening fire on a crowded bar, the Klan and DNC spewing racist vective, and warrantless searches of bad guys' homes.
It's perfectly logical to hold both sets of beliefs. It's what separates normal people from Leftists/folks who can't seem to grasp that concept.
We either fundamentally support rights, or we become leftists and carve up rights to suit our subjective desires that have no basis in logic or the Constitution. For example, breaking up big media...where is that enumerated power in Article 1, Section 8? Right.. it isn't, but a phalanx of alleged conservatives sure want to empower the Justice Dept to do that (because Merrick Garland will DEFINITELY get it right).
Parents of ALL races, creeds, national origin etc have a fundamental right to educate their children free of state interference, period. The road to banning HSing for Religion X leads right to my Christian front door.
And while we are at it, there are Muslims I know who I'd invite to my barbecue before inviting those Christian titans Pelosi, Clinton, Obama, Bidet, Romney, Paul Ryan, and anyone with the last name of McCain.
It's a bit like America. I love her. My love for this nation, her founding principles, and traditions isn't swayed by the loser - or winner when that happens - occupying the Executive. It is invariant to riots, cultural changes, the creep of socialism, or Springsteen fans.
Each person' soul is their responsibility. You can love the Church Trumphant, detest the leaders, and smell the rose without getting jabbed by the thorns.
Just as Fauci is not science, the Catholic church is not the Word of God. Jesus and Jesus alone is the Word of God! - John 1:1.
If you have scripture that says the Catholic Church is the Word of God - would you kindly give us the book/chapter/verse?
Perhaps I should have written “consists of” instead of “is.”
And the popes once frowned on bibles printed in the local languages too. Not surprising. Brazil was once 90+% Catholic and today Protestants are the largest growing denominations in Brazil and Catholcis are down to 50%.
The ill-conceived accommodation that the Catholic Church made towards South America in the 18th and 19th centuries to allow some native pagan beliefs to sit alongside Catholic dogma in order to ease conversions is coming home to roost. Catholic Latin America is a cesspool of anti-Christian and Marxist ideologies, far removed from the Latin Christendom of the Church Fathers and incomprehensible to the Reformers. No wonder this Satanic spawn of the Catholic Church is so susceptible to leftist indoctrination.
“Consists of” — agreed.
“...many conservative and traditionalist Catholics also prefer educating their children at home.”
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They likely don’t want their kid’s heads pumped full of Communist Liberation Theology.
Is anyone forcing you to homeschool your kids? No, no one.
For that reason no one should be forced to institutionalize their children for their schooling.
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