In Ann Arbor there is a flourishing homeschool community, with much sharing of duties and socialization. We don't participate because it isn't right for us, for a number of reasons, none of which make us respect homeschoolers any less. Neither do we send our kids to the local parish-schools, which have substantial problems with standards, ideology (!) and some rather nasty clique-ishness. Nor do we send our kids to the rather punitive and primitive independent Catholic schools we've been encouraged to send them to. We are lucky enough to have a local independent Catholic school in which teachers, parents, and students live their faith in kindness and warmth. My kids, with the help of parents and teachers, are learning to be good people, as well as getting a terrific education. But we had to look long and hard for the school, and many people dismiss it as "not Catholic enough" (mass only once per week, from the most holy man I've ever met) or too "undisciplined." Yet kids from this school do wonderfully in their later education, and in life (judging from the scores, which always are suspect, better than anyone else).

I think there is a moral, here: there is in fact a permanent, universal good of educating your kids to be good, learned people with the skills and habits necessary to lead good, decent lives. But there is no one, single way to achieve that, especially in a society that is as fragmented as ours. One of the central lessons of a traditional reading of natural law is that the universal is made real in the particular. The good isn't attainable as an abstraction, unconnected to circumstances. Whatever the activity — education, economics, politics, architecture — there is no one, abstract, best approach to doing it well under all circumstances, which means making it part of a good life. You have to do the best you can to construct a good life, and anyone who simply says "if you don't do it this way, you are lazy and immoral" is being silly as well as uncharitable. But if you are not willing to think of education, economics, politics, architecture, and indeed most parts of your life, as part of leading a good life, you are most certainly going to make it harder to raise your children to be good people, and to be a good person yourself, regardless of what you happen to read, where you happen to kneel, or how you happen to vote.