"The Home is a School: Every Child a Student" (Entry #02)

by Brian G. Daigle

​In order to make and support the claim that every home is a school, we first must be convinced that every child is a student, and this “studentship” extends beyond the formal classroom, beyond the formal school in which the child is enrolled. Not only does it extend beyond the classroom, the seedbed of the child’s student-nature actually begins at home and extends beyond that particular roofline. Therefore, every home is a school, not because every student brings their learning from school back to home, but because every child brings their innate sense of learning from home out with them into everywhere else they go, especially school.

One of my favorite places to begin, when considering that every child is a student, is to consider what I call the child’s “Human Vocation.” The word vocation has within it the Latin word vocare, which means to call. A calling is not just a preference or a side hobby; a calling is a grip on one’s convictions, gifts, and resources. It is a claim on their person that extends beyond mere preference, and a calling, a true calling, is something we will either lean into throughout our lives or fight against. And calls must be answered, or they can also be ignored. There is a consequence for either. For those who have found their job as an expression of their calling, there is a natural fit that occurs. There is an organic and clear alignment between who they are and what they do. For adults who have ever changed industries or career pathways, often times this becomes clear. A calling is to have your gifts and abilities pre-directed in a particular direction, and some people could spend their whole lives fighting that pre-direction, becoming deeply achy and frustrated and unfulfilled.

Every human, indeed, has a vocation, and that vocation is to be, well, as fully human as they can be. What does that even look like? It means honestly appraising our human faculties, human abilities, human competencies, and human ingredients, and forming and shaping those in a way that is most consistent with their unified purpose, first as a human and then as the unique individual you are. For one, we are social beings, we are also intellectual, spiritual, emotional, embodied, moral, soulful, religious, worshipful, and creative beings. We are also finite and ignorant beings, and yet we do hunger and thirst to rightly know reality, to live into the truth, to align our desires and actions with the good, and to gaze upon and respect beauty. When we don’t do these things, we, as St. Augustine would have said it, disintegrate ourselves. We become less whole, less integrated as human beings.

So how do we then conclude from this that every child is a student? Because of a child’s innate and inevitable human vocation, they want to learn. They must learn. We see this in their natural propensity to play, to be curious, to wonder, to create, to find and maybe press boundaries, to ask questions, to take risks, to explore their emotions, to be vulnerable with and unashamed of their observations, to trust, to philosophize (examine and ask why?), to seek out friends, and to investigate from one degree of knowledge to another. We are not, at the basest level, homo sapiens (thinking man); we are homo adorans (desiring or worshiping man) and that leads us to seek understanding and knowledge, which makes each of us deeply and more broadly homo disciplina (learning man).

But this is true for adults as much as it is true for children. In this way, the home is not just a school for the child, the home is a school for the parents as well. Home should be a place where everyone is learning alongside one another, learning to be more fully human, more fully integrated to the true, the good, and the beautiful. Within their respective human vocations, the child can teach the parent just as much as the parent can teach the child, their mutual humanity coming into contact with one another. If parents are open to this, while maintaining the correct social structures which uphold a healthy home (e.g. not letting children become “friends or pals” in the worse sense of the term) then this shared human learning is something that will foster humility, growth, virtue, mutual respect, and lifelong interest in one another as people and as individuals. When parents see, truly and deeply see, that every child is a student, the home becomes not just a school but the most important school from which a child will take his or her lessons.

The most effective classrooms teachers I know not only know and love their subjects and their students, they also understand the nuances of the student’s human vocation. They know how to tap into the wonder, the curiosity, the questions, not as burdens but as blessings and propulsions. The best classroom teachers I have seen engage the student’s will, intellect, emotions, fears, excitements, trust, friendship, risk-taking, observations, and age-appropriate capacities, and they direct them into a deeper knowledge of and love for whatever is the topic at hand. They engage them as humans first, as classroom students second, and as 5th grade American boys (etc.) lastly. The same is true of the best parents I have seen: the best fathers see their children first as human beings, as fully human, right there in their immature capacities and functions. Yes, even then the young child is still fully human. And that father or mother takes nearly every opportunity (in the kitchen, at the grocery store, at Church, in conflict, with art, cooking together, or anywhere else) to engage the fulness of that child’s humanity and form their knowledge, habits, and desires in the most advantageous and momentous ways.

When a parent sees that every child is a student, they will then see that all of life (and not just the home) is a classroom, and therefore they will see that every moment is a lesson. From there, how can the parent not see how deeply and fully is their call to be great teachers? They need not have the University’s credential or the state’s certification to make them a teacher; the higher and everlasting voice of nature, indeed of God, has called them to be a great teacher.