Homeschooling parents, you can change the world!

 

This past weekend I attended the Minnesota Catholic Home Education Conference.  I heard two excellent talks and discovered interesting materials I had never seen before. I would like to spend the next few weeks here reflecting on what I learned. Those of you who were not able to attend a conference this year can consider this a mini-conference–free of charge!

Long-time homeschooler Ginny Sueffert spoke on “How Catholic Homeschoolers are Changing American Culture.” She told the story of Catholic education in America, with a much more positive perspective than you often hear from homeschool experts. She emphasized, however, that Catholic schools have largely been secularized since the 1960s. According to Sueffert, 100 American dioceses are requiring their schools to follow the Obama Administration’s controversial Common Core Standards.

Sueffert believes that Catholic homeschoolers have really taken over the role the parish schools used to play in Catholic life. I’d like to share with you some uplifting statistics on the good job homeschoolers are doing.

An estimated 80,000 to 100,000 U.S. Catholics are currently being homeschooled. In contrast,  over 2 million students were in Catholic school this year. The NCEA says that over 85%–or more than 1,600,000–of these students were Catholic. So Catholic schools continue to educate about 20 times as many Catholics as  homeschools.

Continue reading about vocations among homeschoolers.