What Notion of Paideia?

CJL: Solidarity and Subsidiarity: Homeschooling Isn't All Risk by Kenneth Garcia

Conflicts over education have a long history, going back at least to ancient Greece. In Sparta education was designed for the benefit of the city-state rather than the individual. The body politic controlled family life and essentially “owned” the child from the time of its birth. At age seven, boys were taken from the home and placed in a state institution for training. There they became children of the state. They lived together and had all things in common. The goal was to train these boys as warriors who would defend the city.

In the Republic, Plato advocated taking children from the home at birth and raising them in common. Children were to be held in common by the city-state, raised and educated by “Guardians” who would engender powerful bonds of loyalty between individuals and the state. No child would know who his or her natural parents were. In Plato’s scheme, the family must be eliminated if the ideal city was to be free of the discord caused by private or kinship loyalties. Aristotle’s Politics presents a similar ideal, but maintains that intermediate associations, between the individual and state, were acceptable as long as the goal of the broader city-state was served.

There is an equivocation on the word "education" -- for Plato, since education was to create citizens and the moral necessarily included a knowledge of the univocal concept of the good, their education had to include "philosophy." But this was not necessarily the case for Aristotle, who recognized that moral education, paideia, did not require a speculative or metaphysical knowledge of the good. In so far as paideia was essentially concerned with the moral formation of citizens, the polis had a role to play in educating the young, even if it was to teach them or enable them to practice the social/political virtues. The norms which they were to learn were not the norms for their households into which they were born, but the norms of behavior for all citizens. It was not necessary for the polis to legislate concerning the acquisition of the speculative sciences need for the life of contemplation. (As for laws regarding the acquisition of skills/techne I will have to double-check but I don't think the polis played a direct role, unless it was necessary to impose consequences for failures or negligence by teachers of techne.)


Garcia offers what is probably a standard account defending the authority of parents to educate their children based on the notion of subsidiarity developed in modern Roman Catholic Social Teaching:

How does this apply to homeschooling? Homeschooling, by its very nature, is a local, family enterprise at variance with the centralizing tendencies of state and federal educational bureaucracies. Many religious leaders criticize the tendency of governments to centralize power, to absorb individuals and civic associations, and to direct their energies towards furthering the government’s interests alone. Although the principle of subsidiarity began as a caution against Communist authoritarianism, its application is broad, and has been adopted in secular as well as religious contexts, e.g., the European Union.

A specific element in CST is the central role of the family in directing the education of children. In fact, in Divini Illius Magistri (1929), Pope Pius XI specifically cited the central holding of Pierce v. Society of Sisters as support for that right. In Gaudium et Spes, the Second Vatican Council noted that the State must protect the right of all children to an education and ensure that education is properly suffused throughout society, but “must always keep in mind the principle of subsidiarity so that there is no kind of school monopoly, for this is opposed to the native rights of the human person . . . to the peaceful association of citizens and to the pluralism that exists today in ever so many societies.”

While the author recognizes that there are also duties imposed by solidarity on families, he doesn't offer any concrete recommendations as to how those duties are to be fulfilled:

CST emphasizes that the rights of individuals and families protected by the principle of subsidiarity have a corollary duty imposed by the principle of solidarity.

In Catechesi tradendae (1979) John Paul II says that education must not neglect education for an integral liberation: “the search for a society with greater solidarity and fraternity, the fight for justice and the building of peace.” Parents who educate their children at home, then, have the duty to teach principles of social justice and promotion of the common good. They must remain linked in solidarity with the broader church and society and endeavor to promote the general welfare and the improvement of society in whatever way they can.

And how could he? Most Roman Catholics are not living in any form of political community -- they live as subjects of the state (or of the Federal Government). Rote learning of the principles of social justice and the common good are not enough -- they must be practiced and cultivated in an actual political community, and their exercise requires not just abstract or generalized precepts of the Natural Law, but concrete derived precepts that direct to action, usually taking the form of the customs and culture of that political community.

Roman Catholic Social Teaching is rightly to be concerned about the abuses of power of the state; but it fails to address the problem that is the state itself. Talk about subsidiarity is a way to limit the power of the state, but is ultimately meaningless if there is no recourse to resistance.