My Rant on Parochial Schools and Field Trips

My son, may God smile on him favorably, has been sentenced by his mother to go to Catholic School. I went to Catholic School. I found roughly half of the population of the school to be very nice people during my 6, 7 with kindergarten, years there. The other half had no redeeming social qualities. Fights were more common than when I got to public school, threats were frequent. When I left the school to go public junior high, I found academic and social life to be much more in tune with the world. I came to the conclusion that most of those "bad" kids went to Catholic School because of their temperment. Big fish in a small pond type of thing.

I went to an open house last night at my sons' school and the flashbacks were horrific. Same type of building construction, classroom layout, sayings on the walls, even the pencils were the same. Imagine sitting all day in a clasroom with words floating around you like "Jesus is in our hearts and all of our teachings, Jesus is in all of us, Jesus is our savior, Jesus teaches, so we learn."

Yuck. Nothing like cramming the lord into a childs throat and asking him/her to fart out the holy spirit.

So the teacher speaks about discipline and stuff. Seemed tame enough. First strike was to be spoken to, second was to be spoken to more and third was a 5 minute timeout. Whoopie. I figured that for the third strike, they might at least be stuck about the face, head, neck, breast and chest. I jest. So I went over and looked at the polaroids of the kids and realized upon looking that the classroom distribution hadn't really changed, that the 50/50 rule still applied. I looked around at the parents and saw the same thing. The clincher for me though, when the obvious lesbian Mom spoke up and asked if her "partner" would be able to come in on Parents Day and the teacher, probably not understanding the true rules of the Catholic Church, says of course your partner can attend. "You should also note that while the church does not condone contaception, you can return your empty condom wrappers to the school to redeem them for classroom supplies."

Anyhow- there were to be several fieldtrips but those were curtailed, due to the price of gas. A Catholic School? No money, they tithe all the time. They pass the collection plate around on a lazy susan for for the love of "Jesus, who teaches, so we learn."

I hope it works out for him there. I hope it doesn't jade him, like it did me. I already talked to him about his "permanent record" and how that was all just bullshit. So, hopefully he'll know more than I did.