Monday, June 18, 2007
CATHOLIC EDUCATION VS. PARENTAL EDUCATION
is the subject of Matt Abbot's column today.
His column consists primarily of a letter from Mary Ann Kreitzer, President of Les Femmes and the Catholic Media Coalition. One of the most telling passages from her letter is the following:
'As for myself, I was constantly warning my children that they could not trust their teachers (even those in Roman collars) to be giving them the truth. They needed to be critical thinkers and test what they were taught against the doctrines of the Church. Isn't that a sad commentary on a Catholic school? But I think it helped them develop critical thinking skills which made them harder to fool. All of my children are adults now and all of them practice the Faith.
I can relate. Whether the breakdown of Catholic values in the Catholic school was intentional or evolutionary, I arrived at the same difficulty when my own was in Catholic school. I had to frequently reteach what she had learned in school, and this pitted me against her teachers--a very bad position to be in. I did finally take her out of Catholic school after sixth grade in order to get away from the Values Clarification program which was a year-long program that I disagreed with because it did not exclusively teach abstinence, and because it included the parish priest teaching birth control to the 8th grade students since, as he told me, "they're going to do it anyway."
