Posted on 01/23/2014 2:48:17 AM PST by markomalley
As we trend toward the end of January, Most dioceses sponsor some sort of “Catholic Schools Week” activities. With that in mind a few thoughts occur to me with regard to both the need for alternatives to public school, and the increasing difficulties related to Catholic schools.
Indeed, one of the great tragedies of modern Church life is the demise of Catholic Schools. They were founded at a time when Catholics did not want their children indoctrinated in Protestant and secular settings, largely inimical to the Catholic faith. Since faith and the salvation resulting from it was most precious gift of all, the thought of exposing their children to these dangers was of such a concern that parents, along with priests and religious made tremendous sacrifices to built, maintain and support Catholic Schools for their children.
The government, then as now, saw this as a threat, realizing that it could not easily influence Catholic children with modern sectarian notions and thereby build “good citizens” (read: loyal party members).
There were many showdowns where government officials spoke menacingly of Catholic Schools and sought to compel either public education, or to severely marginalize Catholic and other sectarian schools.
Most notably, President Ulysses Grant in 1875 indicated in a presidential address to Civil War veterans that, now that the Civil war was won, “The dividing line will not be Mason and Dixon’s but between patriotism and intelligence on one side, and superstition, ambition and ignorance on the other.” He was referring to the Catholic Church when he said ‘superstition’ and went on to insist that there be no funding for Catholic schools and that Church property be taxed. (quoted in McGreevy, Catholicism and American Freedom pp. 91-93).
Hence public schools, (read: government schools) have long been seen as a necessary vehicle of the secular State, and others with secular agendas, to lay hold of the minds of young people. Catholics understood this and resisted it in an era when our faith was more important to us that it collectively is today.
The demise of Catholic Schools is complex. It is not merely that Catholic parents no longer rate the handing on of the faith as important as in the past, but also that many, parents and priests alike, had come to doubt that Catholic schools were any longer doing that effectively. The handing on of the Catholic faith to the young has become difficult in a broken culture of broken families. Further, some argue that Catholic Educational leaders became too enamored of public school ideologies and techniques.
Nevertheless we need Catholic schools more than ever before, and yet, just when we need them most they are going away, closing by the hundreds every year. Some say home schooling is filling the gap. For a few, yes, but the vast majority of Catholic children now go to government run secular schools where they are daily indoctrinated with trendy and often sinful teachings to include the immoral agenda of the homosexual lobby, condom obsessed sexual “teachings” and all sorts of deconstructionist and syncretistic notions that discredit faith, the Scriptures, and the meaning of the human person, and the existence of God. There is also the exaltation of science in a way inimical to faith, bogus notions of tolerance, agenda laden curricula etc.
I was recently made aware of an article in the Reader’s Digest. And while the article has several purposes beyond the scope of this article I write, I would like to excerpt aspects of the Reader’s Digest article that pertain here and encourage you to read the rest here: American Schools Damaging Kids?. As usual, the original text of the article is in bold, black italics. My comments are in plain red text.
Parents send their children to school with the best of intentions, believing that formal education is what kids need to become productive, happy adults. Many parents do have qualms about how well schools are performing, but the conventional wisdom is that these issues can be resolved with more money, better teachers, more challenging curricula, or more rigorous tests. But what if the real problem is school itself? -
Yes our public schools are failing at almost every level. But the fact is they have become a closed system wherein the goal is really not that your kid knows anything at the end of the day, but that his “ticket gets punched” and he can go to the next level of the failing school system, and then to a “noteworthy” college, and get something called a diploma that supposedly opens doors to him after getting even more pieces of paper called a Masters Degree etc.
So the point isn’t really that your kid knows anything at the end of the day, but that they get their ticket punched for access to the American scene. Obviously the less tedious the process the better, so why care about higher standards? Why care if the kid has ever read the classics, knows their times tables, or can read or write above a 5th grade level? The point isn’t skill, its the punched ticket. Its an unhealthy symbiotic agreement.
The unfortunate fact is that one of our most cherished institutions is, by its very nature, failing our children and our society.
Yes, frankly most come out our schools performing very poorly in terms of basic skills such as reading, writing, grammar, basic mathematics, and the ability to think and communicate well.
Compulsory education has been a fixture of our culture now for several generations. President Obama and Secretary of Education Arne Duncan are so enamored of it that they want even longer school days and years. -
And this is an old government technique, not unique to America, wherein the government wants more time with your kids than you. They want to be the main source of information, values and influence. Why? Power, party loyalty, an ability to craft the future and and bring the citizenry in line.
…Schools as we know them today are a product of history, not of research. The blueprint for them was developed during the Protestant Reformation, when schools were created to teach children to read the Bible, to believe Scripture without questioning it, and to obey authority figures without questioning them. -
Fair enough, the earliest schools in this country were founded with this religious purpose, prior to the American Revolution when most of the colonies had an official religious loyalty. But after the Revolution and the Constitution, things went more secular:
When schools were taken over by the state, made compulsory, and directed toward secular ends, the basic structure and methods of teaching remained unchanged. Subsequent attempts at reform have failed because they haven’t altered the basic blueprint…. The top-down, teach-and-test method, in which learning is motivated by a system of rewards and punishments rather than by curiosity or by any real desire to know, is well designed for indoctrination and obedience training but not much else. …
As a society, we tend to shrug off such findings. We’re not surprised that kids are unhappy in school. Some people even believe that the very unpleasantness of school is good for children, so they will learn to tolerate unpleasantness as preparation for real life. But there are plenty of opportunities to learn to tolerate unpleasantness without adding unpleasant schooling to the mix. Research has shown that people of all ages learn best when they are self-motivated, pursuing answers to questions that reflect their personal interests and achieving goals that they’ve set for themselves.
The article goes on to encourage other methods separate from government schools. To which I utter a hearty Amen.
My “Amen” is not regarding methodologies of education, (I am NOT a pedagogical expert); but anything we can do to dismantle the secular and/or government stranglehold over modern education which has become little less than indoctrination and a big money grab is to be encouraged.
Am I too cynical? You decide. Comments are open both for rebuttals and different options.
Yes, I deeply regret the loss of Catholic schools but admit that too many of them had become weak on faith and were mere clones of the government schools. This is not true everywhere, but sadly it was too often the case. We can only pray that the ones that do remain open will focus on being true alternatives to government schools where the Catholic Faith is effectively handed on. In the mean time it can only be hoped that Americans in general and Catholics in particular become more sober about the increasingly negative trends in public (government) education. Higher priority needs to be given to Catholic alternatives.
Msgr Pope points out: I deeply regret the loss of Catholic schools but admit that too many of them had become weak on faith and were mere clones of the government schools.
Msgr Pope ping
Freep-mail me to get on or off my pro-life and Catholic List:
Please ping me to note-worthy Pro-Life or Catholic threads, or other threads of general interest.
Ping!
We are lucky to be in an area where Catholic Schools thrive. Hopefully for years to come. People don’t want to have to pay for tuition is the main reason that in some areas they are closing. God forbid people give up the luxuries and sacrifice for their children. People have gotten so selfish that making sacrifices for their children is out of the question.
Money is a big part of it. I attended paraochial school in the ‘70s and I can remember friends suddenly transfering to public school a year or two shy of graduating. This was when Catholic schools charged by the family and not the student. My missing friends transfered when they were the only kid in their families in the school. There were Carter’s misery index years so these parents maybe forgiven.
The reason costs went up is that Catholic schools were formerly staffed by members of religious orders, ranging from the big women’s teaching orders, such as the Sisters of St Joseph, at lower grade levels and some higher ones, to the Christian Brothers, the Dominicans or the Jesuits at upper grade levels (for boys, at least). When the religious orders collapsed, the schools had to hire lay teachers. Granted, they could never afford to pay them very well, but this still raised the price of the school.
The other thing it did, I think, was let in some less than brilliant teachers who were willing to take lower pay for being in a less challenging or threatening environment, since Catholic school kids were generally moderately well behaved and most of them had supportive families, unlike many public school kids.
I think this contributed to the declining quality of religious education, particularly, since it was now being taught by lay teachers who weren’t especially interested in it or prepared for teaching it. In addition, many Catholic schools hired non-Catholic faculty, all the way up to the principal, and only recently have various bishops begun to require that at least the religion teachers in their diocesan schools be Catholic.
Of course, the miserable quality of Vatican II era textbooks and catechisms didn’t help, either, nor did the dropping of religious practice, in part to accommodate the many non-Catholic students who wanted to attend Catholic school mostly because it was safer.
Parents aren’t willing to pay for an indifferent education with very little to distinguish it from the one they get for free. I think if the Catholic schools really went back to being Catholic and provided solid intellectual formation, hopefully under the direction of a good, revived religious order (look at the Nashville Dominican schools!), parents would be much more willing to make the sacrifice if at all possible, and there’d also be more scholarship funds.
BTTT! May true Catholic Schools re-emerge.
We are currently struggling to save our school from Common Core, which Bishop Taylor has surreptitiously imposed upon us two years ago, with not the slightest warning or even notification of after the fact. I wish Msgnr Pope delved into this development specifically. There are many parishes that are resisting across the country but sadly ours is the only one in the diocese complaining (and it’s only a few of us in the parish since it was such a stealth move), and it’s starting to look like maybe the higher ups have drunk the Kool Aid on it (it’s only standards, not curriculum, what will they do when they get to public high school if they don’t have Common Core to prepare them, blah blah blah). IMHO this is the most insidious move the State has made to undermine Catholic schools yet. Please pray for St. Vincent de Paul school, we are facing an uphill battle.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.