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The home as a defence against the state
THE HOME AS A DEFENCE against the stateby LUCY SHAW
This talk was given in Walsingham on 7 December 2019 at a pilgrimage in defence of primary educators.
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Most of my children are at an age when they would, if they attended schools, be directly affected by the changes to the Personal, Social and Health Education (PHSE) curriculum, but home education will protect them from all but the most indirect effects of them. In a very practical way it is the most certain bulwark against the militant sexualisation of children which is being effected not only through this one subject, but also through many others. However, on its own it is not enough to avoid school. As parents we should be asking ourselves how best we can arm our children for the coming struggle which they in their turn will face, when they emerge from the safety of their homes.
Education is in a state of deepening crisis. Teachers complain that many children start school unable to talk, or not potty trained. Other teachers insist that the point of school is to eradicate the so-called prejudices instilled in children by their parents. The view that many parents are failing so badly at bringing up their children that more unilateral intervention from the state, through schools, is a good thing, is very widely held.
These phenomena have their origin in a common source: the idea that it is the job of schools, not parents, not only to educate but to instil culture and manners. This is not entirely a new idea. Indeed it was an essential part of the post-war evolution of grammar schools into the top tier of a selective school system: children from poor backgrounds were to be given an education and culture foreign to their family and background, to enable them to move into a different social class. The three-tier educational structure of the 1940s has now effectively disappeared, but this well-intentioned educational plan spread the idea, at first applicable to only one group of children, that the job of schools was not to pass on parents’ values, not even to correct those values or place them into a larger context, but systematically to replace those values with completely different ones, as a matter of meritocratic social engineering. Insofar as it was successful, it contributed to the situation often recorded in the popular culture of the 1950s: of parents and adult children who cannot understand each other any more, because the children had not only moved on from the places, pastimes, tastes, and attitudes they grew up with, but could even be ashamed of them.
The notion of schools as value-transplant centres had precedents in the 19th century battles in Italy and France about Church involvement in schools, and even earlier in this country when Catholics were forbidden to be school teachers in penal times. But if schools were expected to teach Protestantism, patriotism, or secularism, it was not so much expected in previous eras that schools would be the primary cultural formators of children: that they would overturn or displace
the bedtime stories, family relationships, and social attitudes, which children absorb in the home. Perhaps the closest they came was in attempting to suppress local languages and dialects, which caused irreparable damage to authentic local cultures. But even this project was undertaken in the main for prosaic reasons.
In this country at least, up until recently, the good or bad influence of schools, and their partial displacement of parents in the formation of children, operated in the context of many, if not most, parents having some meaningful choice between schools. Such choice is no longer possible.
For years parents have complained about schools ignoring their wishes, and talked about the frustration of trying to effect changes to school ethos and curricula. At the same time the educational establishment has ensured that variation amongst schools in terms start, the current crisis is a crisis of family life as well as of schools. The influence of schools is paramount today because of the collapse to such a large extent of the family as an institution capable of forming children – even teaching them their native language or potty training them. Schools have been moving into a vacuum where families ought to have been, even if they have contributed to the creation of this vacuum. What we can’t do about schools, we should be able to do about our own families.
I know that many parents feel hopelessly inadequate faced with this challenge. We have been systematically disempowered, over the course of sixty years. But we should take heart. There is no need to persuade this audience of the colossal mess the establishment has made of the job it has wrested from parents. Mental illness among children is spiralling
of ethos exists only within a narrow band. The result is that at present there are almost no schools to which parents can reasonably delegate their authority and sacrifice their primary influence. This isn’t to say that doing battle with the educational establishment is pointless: on the contrary, we should constantly keep before us a mental image of the education a truly uncompromising Catholic school would provide, and fight as hard as we can to drag what we do have up to that standard. But this particular war shouldn’t be conducted with children on the front line.
The immediate question is how we can form our children in the home in such a way as to rebuild the culture of the Faith strongly enough that they in their turn can pass it on to their own children. We ask this in the context of the historically normal and indeed sane attitude to the role of home and school, which is that values are passed on primarily in the home, and insofar as this occurs outside the home, it should be in accord with the values of the home. As I noted at the (according to figures from the NHS 12.8% of children between 5 and 19 have at least one mental disorder). There can be no doubt that this is connected to the relentless diet of a combination of state-sponsored child abuse, in the form of sex education, and the total absence of moral formation; or perhaps I might more fairly say the perversion of moral formation. An upbringing by wild animals would surely be less pernicious than this. We can go further, though, than simply to argue that the strength of the home school is in the absence of conventional school. Good schools, if we had them, would be good places to play sport and to benefit from teaching from specialists, but contrary to the hopes of some educational theorists, moral education cannot be taught effectively in a school setting. The passing on of values doesn’t take place using books and blackboards (or even interactive whiteboards and iPads). It is through the daily round, the living of Catholic family life, that this is truly learnt, understood and internalised by children.
To express this in another way, values can only be passed on effectively when children can see them instantiated. The values modern schools tell us they want to inculcate in our children – tolerance, mutual respect, intellectual curiosity – are values which few schools, if any, actually instantiate: indeed, a more extreme case of “do what I say, not what I do” is difficult to imagine. That is one reason why they fail to inculcate these values. The values of a Catholic home, however – piety, respect and love for family members, purity, love of beauty, orderliness, discipline – are precisely those which even a very imperfect Catholic family can teach by doing. Children who grow up in a household where these values are reflected in family devotions, in meals eaten together, in daily conversation, in care for one another in sickness and injury, in outings and recreations, in the way the home is managed, and what it feels like to live in it, will come to understand and internalise those values.
Sex education in schools is the natural consequence of the handover of responsibility for the moral education of children from their parents to the state. As the state has made more and more aggressive use of this power, so the home as a place where culture and principles are nurtured and fostered in children has declined. Our job, as I see it, as parents, is primarily to create homes which support not only education and moral formation but also an understanding of family life and its irreplaceable role in society. For many of us, this means relearning what that role is.
Feminism has won such comprehensive victories in the world we live in that the perceptions of almost everyone have been influenced by it. I have registered the births of all my babies in person, and I always ask to be recorded on their birth certificates as a “Housewife”. I’ve been both amused and annoyed by the tactful sympathy with which this is received by registrars, at least one of whom has helpfully drawn my attention to other, less toxic, alternatives such as “Full-time mother”. I was more scandalised, however, to discover that this attitude is shared by some home schoolers. Indeed, admitting to housewifery as an occupation is as shameful as confessing to relying on benefits. Women’s relinquishment of this title has necessarily entailed relinquishment of the many skills which the housewife traditionally possessed: skills which, looked at from the point of view of the labour market, are in fact similar to the CEO of a small business. Catering, laundering, entertaining, furnishing, repairing, managing the employment of regular or
occasional employees, buying and selling: some of the jobs mundane, some involving considerable creativity, it is employment of the most varied and demanding kind. The end product, if the work is performed well, isn’t simply a satisfactory financial return, but the creation of a happy, comforting environment for the worker’s own family: a place of refreshment and rest for both the inhabitants and guests.
Doing this well, contrary to the assertions of feminists, is difficult. Doing it well in combination with homeschooling is particularly difficult. However it isn’t a bolt-on which needs to be squeezed in somehow between swimming lessons and French; neither should home educators have in common, what motivates them when choosing what curriculum to use, is the understanding of the importance of those four things that I have mentioned: purity, beauty, order, and discipline. For any education to succeed, it is essential that it should not be contradicted in word or action by those teaching it. A Catholic school, for example, which makes an attempt to educate children on the Catholic teaching on marriage, but whose teachers are all living lives of open scandal, will make very little headway in impressing its pupils with the importance of taking that teaching seriously. So when we attempt to instil in our children the importance
homeschooling be regarded as a reason for dropping as much of it as possible. The building of a strong and comfortable Christian home is an essential part of our children’s education. When they leave home to enter the final stages of their full-time education, or the workplace, they need to be equipped not only to practise their Faith unwaveringly and defend it in conversation with their colleagues, but also to build their own Christian homes where their own children can be sustained and equipped likewise. A Christian education is one which puts purity, beauty, order, and discipline at the centre of its curriculum. No doubt this is the reason for the widespread attraction of Catholic homeschoolers to the so-called “classical” curriculum which has been developed in America, and which takes as its model the ancient system of grammar, logic and rhetoric, which represents a rigorous and systematic formation, in contrast with the absence of “unschoolers”, who take an entirely childled approach which can result in no education at all, if the child doesn’t ask for one. I’m not immediately interested in arguing the pros and cons of all the different educational approaches on offer. What Catholic of purity, beauty, order and discipline, it is of paramount importance that the environment in which we teach them reflects those things. If the practical reality of home life contradicts the spiritual realities we try to impart; if it is chaotic, dirty, disordered and uncomfortable, we will fail at a fundamental level in passing them on.
Feminism has succeeded so effectively in destroying the housewife, and with her the home skills she possessed, that very few women have received them intact from their mothers and grandmothers. Where housewifely skills have been taught, in general it has been more in the nature of a hobby: the occasional baking of a cake, the fleeting and faddish interest in one craft or another, and not the sustained effort of work and creativity that go into creating a well-kept, well-prepared home. Sometimes, and in my view even worse, fake crafts have replaced genuine crafts to occupy children. Where children in the past might have learnt bobbin lace, for example, they now make friendship bracelets; where they would have been taught darning, and the more advanced skills of embroidery and cutwork, the results of which decorated the homes
of our grandmothers and great-grandmothers, they are now encouraged to play with kits of hama beads. These fake crafts have no wider application; they do not teach skills, and they cannot be used for anything except the making of childish, ugly and useless objects. They are particularly pernicious because they trivialise the importance of true crafts, which are not and never have been simply a way of entertaining oneself and using up time, but rather are necessary to sustaining a comfortable, elegant and civilised way of life. They have displaced true crafts, many of which are in desperate straits, on the verge of being lost altogether, because so few people retain the skill to practise them and struggle to find people interested in learning them. Creating a home means, among other things, rediscovering these crafts which have slipped through the cracks between the generations, and making them integral to home life.
How to do that is the biggest challenge facing young families. Most wives and mothers of my generation have few home-making skills. However, although housewifery is in crisis, books about caring for the house are booming: it’s no coincidence, of course. Indeed, seekers after housewifely knowledge are faced with an embarrassment of riches when they visit their local bookshops to find it. I soon found, as I pursued my researches into housekeeping, that there are a variety of approaches to housework, which are often at odds with each other. This phenomenon exemplifies my view that housekeeping should not be taught out of books. Who will teach you how to pick the right book? Without an understanding of the purpose and end of home-making, it’s easy to pick an approach almost at random, and find yourself worse off than before. Because there is a right and a wrong way of approaching housework, and a well-ordered approach is learnt without necessarily articulating the philosophy which underpins it, shaping one’s attitudes and reinforcing one’s Christian instincts by creating a home in which those things are reflected and supported. It might seem odd to talk about an anti-Catholic approach to housework. Housework in most people’s minds has been reduced to a list of mundane chores (empty the bins, do the laundry, clean the bathroom): and how can there be a Catholic and an anti-Catholic approach to that? But housekeeping is a great deal more than that, just as running a successful business can’t be reduced to bookkeeping and 9-5. Keeping house is the art of living well, and looked at from a Catholic perspective, it also provides the ordered pattern of our days that can imitate the cloistered life.
I think it’s worth mentioning a housekeeping philosophy I’ve encountered which I consider to be a particularly malign influence on the home, to give you an appreciation of what is at stake in this matter of the importance of housework. This is the Marie Kondo approach, as contained in The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying. I know lots of people have found this book helpful in de-cluttering their houses and it is true that it is much easier to keep house successfully if you don't
have tons of rubbish in it. But the author's guiding principle, that you should keep nothing except that which “sparks joy”, is mistaken. There are many reasons for keeping a thing aside from that. For example, you might have an obligation to the person who gave it to you; it might be an heirloom to be guarded and passed on, and not morally yours to dispose of at will; it might be a thing of beauty; it might be a blessed object; it might be a record of the past. She advises her followers to treat the objects they are dealing with as though they are people; to thank them for their service before binning them. In my experience if you start to treat objects like people, you will end by treating people like objects, and this belief has indeed been proved many times by people who have taken the Marie Kondo way of life to its natural conclusion and got rid of their husbands and close friends along with the photo albums and cuddly toys. The other big problem with it is that this book is not about keeping house. It is about emptying your house. So if you find a blouse that is missing a button, Marie Kondo tells you to throw the blouse away. And rather than do the drying up, she wants you to put your draining rack outside until everything is dry enough to put away. And you should not store any sheets, keeping only the ones that are actually on the bed.
We live in a society where there is a vacuum where housewifely skills used to be. As a result, people’s homes are in chaos, and they don’t like it. But because feminist principles still hold sway, learning to keeping house is not seen as an acceptable solution to this, and the Marie Kondo thesis is filling that gap. It’s pernicious for the reasons that I have already mentioned; but also it has created in people’s minds the idea that the ideal house is a minimalist one. Every parent, and in particular homeschoolers, surrounded by mountains of Montessori sensorial materials, Latin textbooks, craft equipment etc., at some point is going to feel the attraction of that minimalist house, with its empty shelves (apparently Marie Kondo herself said that no one should own more than 50 books), its blank surfaces, its one ornament surrounded by a sea of space. But we need to re-order our ideas about the ideal home. We need to fight back against society’s imposition of this false ideal. It is a fake. It is sterile. It has nothing to do with providing a home, a loving and comfortable home for its occupants. How can a house with no spare sheets ever offer hospitality to an overnight guest? How can a house with no books
inform and educate the people inside it? How can this minimalist paradise ever feel like home? Will it not, rather, present the menacing suggestion that family and friends are present only under sufferance, and, should they fail to spark joy, will be out on their ear along with the rest of the family furniture? Furthermore, the destruction of so much that makes up the contents of a normal household means living in a sealed moment of the present, where mementos of the past are not kept and the history of family life is not passed on. We should not punish ourselves for having homes full of books and toys and furniture.
The point of the care of the house is to serve and honour the people who live in it and visit it, to make them comfortable. Chaos is obviously undesirable, leading as it does to waste and discomfort; but so too is a puritanical style of housekeeping that puts the cleanliness of the home above the comfort of its occupants. The Marie Kondo books are one manifestation of this particular trap.
Another approach which I think unhelpful might be called the unrepentantly chaotic mother’s approach. This is a guide to life, not just to housekeeping, which takes a strictly materialistic line. Rather than identifying the most important work, and ordering one’s time accordingly, this approach asks you to work out how much time you are wasting (on the phone, for example, or on social media) and to reduce it by precisely that amount of time you want for other things. This approach turns the Catholic idea that our time belongs to God and we have an almost sacred obligation to make the best use of it on its head. Not only that but it puts self-interest at the centre of the schedule. Time is spent according to the whims and pleasures of the so-called housekeeper, and the needs of the family are given no weight at all.
A Catholic approach to housekeeping and home making would of course avoid these colossal mantraps. Structure, routine and prayer give order and shape to the day. Cleanliness and tidiness are given their due importance, but mess-making activities in the interests of education are freely permitted with no guilt attached. Certain places, such as the parents’ bedroom, are kept tidy and free from mess, toys and dirt at all times; certain times, such as meal times and prayer times, require all family members’ quiet and respectful presence. Above all, the care of the housewife is to provide a loving, serene and comfortable environment for the family, where Christian virtues can be cultivated and practised.
I know that many people assume that families, and large families in particular, live in a state of permanent noise and chaos, at least when everyone is at home. Certainly many people have told me that it must be chaos in my house. I wouldn’t want to say noise and dirt were unheard-of in my home, but the idea that chaos and noise are inseparable from large family life is wrong and also very corrosive. In that search for the perfect home which most people are engaged in, children are very definitely seen as a hindrance, not a help. But Catholic family life, lived properly, is, for the most part, tranquil, comfortable and happy. Large families are a witness, everywhere they go, to the traditional Catholic teaching on the family. Our Catholic homes, too, are, or should be, a witness to those Catholic values of order and beauty which are so central to the Faith: a visible contradiction of the ugly, destructive, anti-life ethic of the secularist ideology.
The family is under unprecedented attack, an attack which is growing in strength all the time and to which families are increasingly vulnerable, particularly in the absence of strong leadership from the Church. I am sure you have all seen among your own friends and family the direct effects of this; I know I have. I have a pet theory for which I have no direct evidence at all, that one factor which contributes to family breakdown (not perhaps the decisive, or even one of most important ones, but nevertheless one that weighs in
the balance) is that people feel dissatisfaction in their family life because of its discomforts. The home is uncomfortable and uncared for, and a place to be avoided. Everyone is looking for a home, particularly adult children of divorce; looking for that place of comfort and rest, and not finding it. The attack on the family is being made on a multiplicity of fronts, and one of those is the physical home itself. Re-establishing the honour of the housewife is an essential part of winning the war against the state’s power grab of parents’ moral authority over their children. It also guarantees the existence of homes where Catholicism can be practised and passed on, where it is visible to all visitors, a public sign of the beauty and permanence of our beloved Faith.
Lucy Shaw read French and Spanish at Royal Holloway, London University, before completing a Diploma in Food and Wine from Leith’s School of Food and Wine, and more recently the Certificate in Technical Hand Embroidery from the Royal School of Needlework, where she is now working for the Diploma. She is the National Coordinator of the Guild of St. Clare, dedicated to the making and restoration of liturgical vestments, and homeschools eight children.
PHOTO CREDIT: JIM HALE
