This is the fourth article in the Formations Series. Read “Part 1: From Parish to Public School: The Rise of a Civic Orthodoxy,” “Part 2: Schools Teach Subjects, Families Form People,” and “Part 3: The Formation of the Future: On Outsourcing Virtue.”
The Parent as Amateur
Several years back, perhaps a decade and a half ago, I attended the retirement ceremony of my kindergarten teacher. She taught at the Catholic school I attended for part of my youth. After the ceremony, I approached her to express my gratitude for her service and mentioned that I had attended her kindergarten class. Not surprisingly, she had no recollection of me, the year I attended, or any significant details about me. How could she? She had taught thousands of children over thirty years, twenty to thirty students at a time. I have often thought about the idea that professional educators love their students. What does it mean to love a student who is necessarily passing through? Is that love bound by the professional relationship? Does it involve sacrifice in the same manner as the love found within the family? These questions return whenever I encounter social media posts in which public school teachers and administrators attest to the “love of a teacher for the student.” If the relationship between teacher and student is necessarily limited in ways that the relationship between parent and child is not, can public institutions truly bear the educational responsibility that families have transferred to them?
When discussing homeschooling with friends, coworkers, colleagues, or others who are curious about it, a common response emerges: “I couldn’t do that; I don’t have the patience,” or “I lack the tools to educate my kids. The education of children should be left to professionals.” These responses assume that professional expertise places the professional educator in a better position to educate the child than the parent. Yet the word amateur ultimately derives from the Latin amator, meaning “one who loves.” A parent is an amateur in this original sense: one uniquely positioned to teach and learn alongside their children out of love.i Professional educators may possess training, experience, and expertise that parents do not, but professional expertise cannot replicate the relationship between parent and child.
Love, Sacrifice, and the Ordering of Education
Arguably, the first and most important element in education is love for the student, because love entails a willingness to sacrifice for another’s good. The word sacrifice derives from the Latin sacrificium, which means “making sacred” or “making holy.”ii Within the Christian understanding of sacrifice is also the surrender of the will. In the Garden of Gethsemane, Christ, confronting the suffering before Him, submits Himself to the Father: “Your will be done” (Matt. 26:42 NABRE). The parents’ educational responsibility is similarly grounded not primarily in professional qualification but in a relationship ordered toward the good of the child and sustained by a willingness to sacrifice for that good.
For the Christian parent, however, the good toward which education is directed cannot end with the child alone. A rightly pointed catechesis places God at the center, with the pursuits of education ordered around and toward Him.iii The responsibility of the parent is therefore not merely to ensure that a child acquires knowledge but to direct that education toward knowledge of God, His creation, and the child’s place within it. The parent as amateur—one who loves—approaches education from a relationship of enduring responsibility that no professional qualification, however valuable, can itself reproduce.
What Institutions Are Asked to Bear
If the professional cannot reproduce a relationship of sacrifice, what happens when families nevertheless transfer an increasing share of their educational responsibility to the professional institution? The responsibility does not disappear; it accumulates within the institution receiving it. Public schools are now expected to do considerably more than provide academic instruction. They are called upon to socialize children, cultivate character, encourage emotional development, manage behavior, promote citizenship, provide meals, ensure safety, and prepare students for adult life.iv Each additional responsibility requires teachers, administrators, programs, funding, and regulation to support it. The resulting bureaucracy should therefore not be surprising. Neither should the frustration of teachers who argue that their compensation and resources are insufficient for what society increasingly expects them to accomplish.v The question is whether the institution is failing under poor administration or whether we have simply asked it to bear too much.
Freedom Through Responsibility
Education independence, then, is freedom through responsibility. When families retain responsibility for their children’s education, they naturally retain the authority to determine how that education will be delivered. When that responsibility is transferred to an institution, however, the authority and resources necessary to fulfill it must follow. My kindergarten teacher did not fail me because she could not remember me decades later; her responsibility for me was bound by the professional relationship we shared. Unlike that of the professional educator, whose responsibility naturally ends when the student moves on, the family’s responsibility endures. It does not expire when the child advances to another classroom, graduates from school, or enters adulthood. Families are imperfect, and circumstances change, but the relationship itself persists beyond the temporary boundaries of the classroom. Public institutions assume a role in educating children only when families surrender some measure of their educational authority to them. Perhaps the weight now borne by public education is not simply the product of a bureaucracy grown too large but the consequence of asking an institution to carry responsibilities that families were never meant to surrender.
i Leigh A. Bortins, The Habits of a Classical Education: Practicing the Art of Grammar (Classical Conversations Multimedia, Inc., 2026).
ii “Origin and history of sacrifice,” Etymonline: Online Etymology Dictionary, Douglas Harper, https://www.etymonline.com/word/sacrifice. In Matt. 26:42, Christ demonstrates that love may require the surrender of one’s own will despite personal cost. Applied to education, the passage illustrates how a parent’s love may likewise require subordinating personal desires to the responsibility of educating and forming one’s children.
iii Classical Conversations Catalog (Classical Conversations Multimedia, Inc., 2025).
iv “The Future of Education and Skills: Education 2030,” OECD, Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, 2018, https://www.oecd.org/content/dam/oecd/en/about/projects/edu/education-2040/position-paper/PositionPaper.pdf; “Fundamentals of SEL,” CASEL, Collaborative for Academic, Social, and Emotional Learning, accessed June 7, 2026, https://casel.org/fundamentals-of-sel/.
v Kate Denning, “Teachers across NC Stage Walkout over Benefits, School Funding,” Carolina Public Press, January 8, 2026, https://carolinapublicpress.org/74142/teachers-across-nc-stage-walkout-over-benefits-school-funding/.
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