Choice — leisure or learning

John O'Leary looks at the costs of independent Catholic schooling
ONE OF the major problems concerning the education of our children in Independent Catholic Schools today is the question of cost.
Yet, whatever the cost, there are still many parents willing to make enormous financial sacrifices to give their children the benefit of an education which will, they hope, prepare them adequately to face this life, and the next.
There are, or course, many parents fortunate enough to be in the diplomatic service, in the armed forces, or employed by multi-national corporations, or big business, who are assisted financially in the independent school education of their children. These are the lucky ones.
Then there are the rich Catholic aristocracy, the landowners, the yeomen of England, who can afford the cost of a "Rolls Royce" Catholic education for their heirs and heiresses. They are singularly blessed.
In all cases the parents are exercising their God-given right of freedom of choice in education, a right which, incidentally, a labour government would deny them, despite the fact that so many leaders of the Labour party have been products of independent schools, as for example Prime Minister Attlee.
Many parents in excercising their God-given right of freedom of choice in education make considerable sacrifices such as not buying that new car, not taking that holiday in the sun, giving up tobacco, etc.
And why do they make such personal sacrifices? The answer should be that an education in an Independent Catholic School offers the answer to the very simple and fundamental question: "What is life all about?"
An answer we have always cherished is that of .a former Housemaster of a leading Catholic independent School; "The purpose of life is to recognise that your own freedom and that of every one else in the world is not fundamentally a question of politics and economics, of purchasing power and the standard of living, important though these things are, but it is a question of recognising first the image of eternity which each person is born with.
When you have seen that, the Purpose of life is to realise — in the sense of making real — that image in your own life and to help, as far as possible, others to do the same.
And, 1 should add, that neither the recognition nor the realisation are easy and that however early we start, none of .us will have completed the process when life comes to its end."