Many Home-Based Education advocates argue that Educational activity of minor children is properly and uniquely located in the family.  They thus imply that School, or any educational entity not family-based, is non-normative.

In contrast, some School advocates argue that the School is a product of social progress.  And that only in primitive society does education resided in the family, just as did the business, government and religious functions of society.  But now that we have an advanced society, these functions are differentiated.  The Family’s function is very, very limited, and no longer includes education.

How do we understand the individuality of Family and of School, and the question of the historicity of each?   Dooyeweerd did not write much about School. But he did write about Family.

According to Dooyeweerd (Critique, 1969, III, p269):

The natural community between a couple of parents and their children under age is not a relationship with an undifferentiated inner destination. If it were, it would disappear in the advance of the differentiating process in historical development. It would then be a rudiment of a former historical phase.  But this view is refuted by the facts.

Holy Scripture throws a quite different light on the natural communal bond of the family in its most narrow sense, even though it does not give us a theoretical analysis of its typical inner structure. In presents the family as a typical normative bond of love, based upon the natural ties of blood between parents and their immediate off-spring. This is a reflection of the bond of love between the Heavenly Father and His human children, unbreakably bound to the tie between Christ and his Church.

In this temporal natural community, the normative tie of love between the members of family cannot be identified with the religiously meaningfulness of love in the corpus Christi, notwithstanding its ultimate reference to the latter in the anticipatory direction of cosmic time. The bond of love is here rather of a temporal modality of meaning, because it is founded in the biotic modality. As the structural leading or qualifying function of the family, it is of a modal character. According to the normative structural law of the natural community in question, this typical moral function ought to give all earlier structural functions their internal direction and leading.

According to its inner structure of individuality, the natural immediate family is thus an institutional moral community of love between parents and their children under age, structurally based upon biotic ties of blood relationship.

Note the following:

• The Family is Led, or Qualified by the Ethical (aka Moral) Aspect.   The Ethical aspect ought to direct functioning in the preceding aspects.
• The Family is Founded in the Biotic (aka Biological) Aspect. So, while the Ethical Aspect is Normative, the Family is not Eternal.  Rather, it is Temporal. We know this because it is Founded in the Biotic.
• Because the Founding aspect (the Biotic) anticipates the Historical (aka Formative) Aspect, the Family DOES NOT have an undifferentiated inner destination. In other words, the Family is not a passing institution. We should not expect in the future to witness the institution of Family dissolve and it’s functions become differentiated into other institutions.

PHOTO: Leroy (1917-2003) and Edith (1917- 2006) McClain, of Butler, PA, with sons Donald and Richard, circa 1963.