Education: October 2005 Archives

Not bad: a school in liberal Newton, Mass., cancelled Halloween observances in response to complaints. It's good that somebody in this very P.C. place respected the objections of offended religious parents -- whether Christian, Jewish, or Muslim, we don't know yet.

The article also doesn't say quite what the parents' objections were. The old Celtic pagan holiday that fell on the 31st seems relatively benign, a bit of harmless myth-making, so I don't object to that too much, except on the grounds that I don't want public schools to promote neo-paganism. But in the pop culture, Halloween has become an opportunity to celebrate figures of evil and horror, and (call me a fundamentalist, but) I don't want that degraded phenomenon to have a platform in the schools. After all, if it weren't for the schools promoting Halloween, it would be a pretty minor annual affair, as it deserves to be.

Every time I have the slightest twinge of doubt that Catholic school is worth the money, something like this happens.

Apparently, some athletes Osbourn High School in Manassas decided to have a "sexual incident" one afternoon, to use the clinical term from the article. And did the parents discipline their children, or move to another state? No -- according to WMAL, a local station, they complained that their rutting children were punished too severely.

Whenever parents attack the authorities for punishing their misbehaving kids, one can only assume it's displaced anger from shame. They think that by defending their children, they can refrain from blaming themselves. That's the charitable interpretation -- the less charitable one would be that they really think there's nothing wrong with such an "incident."

I will be completely happy to write that tuition check next month.