On reopening schools in the fall, especially as it pertains to the Catholic Church:

1) A partial or fully virtual reopening may imperil pre-K & kindergarten enrollment. Many parents won't see the tuition as worth it, especially as they'll have to be home with their kids anyway.

(The fact is, for many people, school is a more affordable form of child care. That's a another topic!) Pre-K and Kindergarten classes are often larger, subsidizing higher grades that have lower enrollment. Loss of that tuition will hurt schools struggling to stay open.

2) This should have been a moment for dioceses to promote homeschooling, or at least facilitate its application by many more people, finding leaders in that community to offer training on how to do it, etc. But its promotion is still too often seen as competitive, adversarial.

Both points show that, for the most part, we are uninterested in finding an integration or synthesis, to help parents be the primary educators of their children, aided by communal and institutional contexts and practices. Why? Because we have rival philosophies of education.

In other words, we still see Catholic parochial schools and homeschooling as a zero-sum contest. But what needs to happen is to step back and ask, what is the purpose and nature of education to begin with, within the ends of human life and its essential structures and conditions.