So, the sins of the mothersFollow

Given your track record, you should probably stop right there.

Is it possible he actually meant to write "arteritis?" Because Mr. Ambrya's grandmother has that, and it took me forever to understand what the family was talking about because everyone kept calling it arthritis. It has also affected her vision and requirs steroid treatment, though she is pushing 90, so it's been rough on her. The arteritis has nearly cost her all her eyesight, and the prednisone treatments have resulted in diabetes and a whole bunch of other problems.

I can't wrap my head around why a non-catholic lesbian couple would want their child to attend a catholic school. The school's teachings certainly go against the couple's personal beliefs.

Sure, it might be a better school than the public one, but if they're willing to pay to send their child to Catholic school I'm sure they can pay to send their kid to a different private one as well.

The school is actually taking the more practical approach here by saying, "Listen, lesbians. It's not in your best interest for you to pay us to teach your kid, among other things, that your relationship is sinful in the eyes of the church."

I spent a year in parochial school hell, and I have to say no big loss. I'd have preferred going to school in Watts to Catholic school. I gotta say, though, the Catholic school kids always had the best white drugs.

Really? You don't think that a kid would be stressed out to have to start at a new school and make new friends?

Having been that kid, I can tell you, I certainly gave two *****. I gave my parents hell for moving us when I was about to start middle school with all of my friends. The kids I'd grown up with. I hated starting at a new school.

This was part of my problem with Catholic school. I went to one school K-5, and all of the kids I knew from grade school moved on to the same middle school three blocks away. My parents got divorced the end of my 5th grade year, so my dad had end-all be-all decision making suddenly and plopped me into a completely new school, uniformed, my first day of middle school. We were poor and on tuition assistance, as were a few others at the school, but the school wasn't that wealthy, anyway. The church always had more money than the school, and is always begging for money to this day, but I really felt a limit to their resources there. One hallway, 6 teachers for the entire middle school, two classes in each grade - we'd just rotate teachers down the hallway throughout the day. For three years. Narrow-minded fail teachers.

I really felt the hurt of not being able to go to a large, public school. My dad thought he was "sheltering" me. He wasn't. The kids at that Catholic school on my first day of middle school shocked me. They were gruff, crude, and some of them were already sexually active - of course, that shocked me, because no one I had ever known before my age had been sexually active. At 12. Speaking of girls who are perpetual victims...

Oh well. I know that all schools and experiences are different, but I learned the hard stereotype of "Catholic school" kids. Didn't help that 80% of the school's population was Italian-American. (I am I thank god all the time that I didn't inherit my mother's big mouth.)

All that on top of being an awkward nerd, bored with school, and being tormented endlessly for not having name-brand clothing when I could wear what I wanted, made my Catholic school experience fairly miserable. However, I get that I am a unique snowflake. I can't say what's best for anyone else.

Ugh. CDC CCD. Gotta stay away from this thread now because it is bringing up long-buried Catholic traumas.

edit: So long buried I couldn't tell BT what it stood for, and had to look it up. After several pages of Google the correction hit me. I know they call it different things, but for the uninformed, it's basically what Catholics do for Sunday school, for the kids who don't get the Catholic doctrine in their daily classes at school. Heathen children we were.

Edited, Mar 11th 2010 11:05am by Guenny

Samira, stealing my jokes before I make them.

No, she's right; it's arthritis. In the eye, it's called iritis, or uveitis.

The oldest was in Kindergarten last year. The youngest was in pre-school. It's not like they've formed life long friendships here... Heck. When I was a kid a lot of schools didn't include Kindergarten. It was an optional school you could send your kids to before starting "real school" at first grade. It was not uncommon to go to different pre-school and kindergarten than the school where you attended starting in first grade.



Middle school is not kindergarten... And it's hardly a hardship anyway. Lots of kids move schools because their parents move. It happens. It's hardly the end of the world for the kids. Again, we don't know the details of this situation, but assuming whatever reason cropped up to cause the school to want the parents to take their kids elsewhere would not have magically gone away, isn't it better to make that decision now rather than have those kids suffer for 8 years in a school in which perhaps they'll be made fun of by the other kids?


At the end of the day, as several people have pointed out, a private school can set whatever criteria they want for admission. it's kinda silly to insist that your kids should attend a private school with stated principles which you violate (publicly) every single day in your life.

Back in the day, we said it stood for Christian Catholic Detention.

I'm personally against private schools that impose silly entrance criteria. I think private schools should only be allowed if they follow the national curriculum to a "t", and if they don't discriminate in any way apart from financially. And even then, I think they should be forced to take in a % of kids that can't afford to go there in scholarship. I'm also against home-ed, by the way.

I think society has a fundamental vested interest in the way children are taught. You shouldn't be able to teach kids that, for example, evolution is a theory, or that God created the world in 6 days, or that using a condom is a sin. I also think that the more segregation you have in the education system, the more segregation you will have later on in society in general. Private schools are fundamentally a way to perpetuate the current social order and its inequalities.

People can tell their kids whatever they want to at home. But education is a responsibility that the state has to its citizens and to society at large. It shouldn't be left to churches and mosques, it's not the 16th century anymore.