Category: Education

Time to write something a little less controversial. Here’s my latest from Catholic Exchange. It concerns the Catholic education of children.

Dawn Eden writes that a NJ newspaper’s article about a supposed no-blogging policy for high school students was misleading. A diocesan spokesman told her that the school only banned the posting of certain types of material: personal identifying information, comments about the school, and comments about other students. If that more moderate policy is actually being followed by the school administrators, then I think the fuss is settled.

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.

Now that our phone line and internet is hooked up again, I have spent part of the day surfing the net. In so doing, I couldn’t help but notice some of the debates over homeschooling take place. While nobody disagrees that the education usually is superior to that of public schools, there is some question as to how well adapted homeschooled children are socially after they graduate.
In my experience, it depends upon the parents. I have seen both good and bad. In one particularly egregious example, one of my friends roomed in college with a homeschooled fellow who grew up in a very sheltered environment — to the point of social inneptitude. For example, he was clueless as to who Darth Vader was.
Another story takes place within the context of a particular post-conciliar traditionalist schisms, which has attracted many adherents to a certain geographical locale. As soon as the girls reach their late teens or early twenties, they marry guys in their late thirties to early forties. They simply cannot relate to guys their own age, as the girls find the guys their own age too socially immature and too sheltered to maintain decent employment and support a family. So, obviously, this is the downside.
On the other hand, some of the most socially well-adjusted young men I have met were also homeschooled. I’m thinking, in particular, of a friend of mine whom I met through the FSSP. His parents were both military officers and took the view that homeschooling was about raising their children to be tommorrow’s Catholic leaders. Therefore, they didn’t see homeschooling as sheltering their children, but as an apprenticeship to maintaining one’s faith while venturing forth in the real world.
So besides the usual homeschooling activities of catechesis, reading, writing, mathematics, history, geography, etc… their kids also participated in sports, the arts, community service, choir practice, boy scouts and even scuba-diving (my friend’s father explained that this wasn’t just phys-ed, but a reinforcement of the lessons learned in mathematics and geography as well.) Another homeschooled friend of mine, who I met through the charismatic movement, did small-aircraft piloting rather than scuba-diving.
In each case, some of the other parents in the respective parish thought these parents were too libertine, wasteful and risky with the lives of their children. But their children have all turned out well. They came out from homeschooling well-adjusted young adults, with real life skills and capable of assuming responsibility. All have all kept the faith. They are all grateful for their home-schooling background, and remain close to their parents. One is about to graduate with a double-degree in fine arts and engineering. The other is a well-liked pilot and aircraft mechanic. Both are active in their faith.
On the other hand, a lot of my homeschooled friends whose parents sheltered them have turned out aweful. The one that breaks my heart the most is an ex-girlfriend who rebelled against her parents, got involved with a drug-addict, had a child that was given up for adoption, never finished high-school, and now works in the so-called “adult entertainment” field and is bitter against both her family and the Catholic faith. Others have become a variation, albeit not as bad.
So my point is that homeschooling depends upon the parents. If parents use homeschooling to shelter their kids from the real world, this is not good. But if parents use homeschooling to prepare their kids for the real world, then the results are much better than a public school education.
The same can be said about private Catholic schools. I know some traddy schools that simply shelter kids, and the kids graduate knowing all sorts of facts and figures, but still socially and emotionally immature. On the other hand, St. Gregory’s Academy — under the auspices of the FSSP — openly has as its purpose not only classical education of teenage boys, but their formation and growth from boys into responsible young men. Thus the boys are expected to participate in sport, theatre, music and various social activities. When they graduate, it is a educated and well-adjusted young men.