Aim. Historiography of education in the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth discusses family upbringing, parish schooling, and Enlightenment reform as separate fields. Józef Legowicz’s 1779 guide for rural householders brings them together. The article reconstructs how Legowicz allocated responsibility for children’s upbringing between parents, the household, and the parish school, and asks how the example set by adults made that responsibility credible. Methods and materials. The study applies qualitative historical source analysis to the 1779 edition of Powinności gospodarzów wiejskich [The duties of rural householders]. It combines internal textual analysis with contextual compariso to the Commission of National Education’s 1774 regulation for parish schools and with research on childhood, parish institutions, and the Catholic Enlightenment. The source is read as a normative programme rather than a transparent record of practice. Results and conclusion. Legowicz treated the home as the primary environment of religious and moral formation, but required parents to send children to parish school. Its curriculum combined catechesis and manners with reading, writing, arithmetic, and useful crafts. Schooling was justified simultaneously as obedience to God, service to the Church and country, and a long-term benefit to the family. Parental authority depended on conduct: obscene speech, anger, and violent correction contradicted the lesson being taught. Evidence from Korkożyszki shows that Legowicz supported this programme institutionally. The guide articulated a complementary home–school model of rural education. Although hierarchical and utilitarian rather than child-centred in the modern sense, it widened parental duty beyond domestic instruction to include access to schooling and the credibility of everyday example.