How long has the Church taught that parents are primary educators? Pope Benedict writes that St. Jerome promoted the necessity of parents as loving teachers as early as the 4th Century. From his book The Fathers of the Church:
“Lastly, one cannot remain silent about the importance that Jerome gave to the matter of Christian pedagogy. He proposed to form “one soul that must become the temple of the Lord,” a “very precious gem” in the eyes of God. With profound intuition he advises to preserve oneself from evil and from the occasions of sin, and to exclude equivocal or dissipating friendships.
“Above all, he exhorts parents to create a serene and joyful environment around their children, to stimulate them to study and work also through praise and emulation, encouraging them to overcome difficulties, forster good habits and avoid picking up bad habits, so that, and here he cites a phrase of Publius Syrus which he heard at school: “it will be difficult for you to correct those things to which you are quietly habituating yourself.” Parents are the principle educators of their children, the first teachers of life. With great clarity Jerome, addressing a young girl’s mother and then mentioning her father, admonishes, almost expressing a fundamental duty of every human creature who comes into existence: “May she find in you her teacher, and may she look to you with the inexperienced wonder of childhood. Neither in you, nor in her father should she ever see behavior that could lead to sin, as it could be copied. Remember that...you can educate her more by example than with words.” Among Jerome’s principal intuitions as a pedagoge, one must emphasize the importance he attributed to a healthy and integral education beginning from early childhood, with the particular responsibility belonging to parents, the urgency for a serious moral and religious formation and the duty to study for a complete human formation. Moreover, an aspect rather disregarded in ancient times but held vital by our author is the promotion of the woman, to whom he recognizes the right to a complete formation: human, scholastic, religious, professional. We see precisely today how the education of the personality in its totality, the education to responsibility before God and man, is the true condition of all progress, all peace, all reconciliation and the exclusion of violence. Education before God and man: it is Sacred Scripture that offers us the guide for education and thus of true humanism.
“We cannot conclude these quick notes on the great Father of the Church without mentioning his effective contribution to the safeguarding the positive and valid elements of the ancient Hebrew, Greek, and Roman cultures for nascent Christian civilization. Jerome recognized and assimilated the artistic values of the richness of the sentiments and the harmony of the images present in the classics, which educate the heart and fantasy to noble sentiments. Above all, he put at the center of his life and activity the Word of God, which indicates the path of life to man and reveals the secrets of holiness to him. We cannot fail to be deeply grateful for all of this, even in our day.”