'Faith' (see:religious) schools - good or bad?

[gjhdiver 0]

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No disrespect intended, but ;) is it possible that your experiences have led you to desire life to be neat, structured and orderly and you equate that with academic superiority? For example, what kind of work do you do? I'd give small odds that it was something with a clearly understood hierarchial structure. (military?)

Oooh ladies and gentlemen, we have a winner.

I'll let JP fess up to his running dog past as an oppressor of foreign types, and upholder of bourgious property vales etc etc.

However, his neatness and order do serve some functions. I always know where he hides his peanuts and snacks when he's in the air.

However, as anyone who saw him face down in his salad in John's Steak House, it all goes to shit after a few adult beverages.

[gjhdiver 0]

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The experience of benign indoctrination at the former was what started me on my long road to lifelong atheism and scepticism.

Yeah, that's what my Mom said, that for all that money the freaking priests kept us questioning everything, including faith, and it made us all agnostics. For a while, anyhow.

Funny old thing that. For the last three years of my primary education, I was taken out of the catholic school, and placed in a state school. The reason being that the academic results of the religious school were appalling. I gained a scholorship for private college from the free state school, which had execellent academic results.

However, even with the nostalgia of hindsight, I have fond memories of the catholic school. Maybe the UK in the early 60's was just a gentler place than it is now. My problems with organized religion funnily enough, don't stem from that experience, but from a deep seated mistrust of fundamentalism in any guise.

[gjhdiver 0]

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Now that's a bit unfair. I blame it on the nuns. Aside from a pressing need for neatness, order and structure, I'n pretty sure they drilled him on the rote memory stuff. Try him on multiplication tables ;)

Funny that. I was just remembering the other day, that one of my earliest memories of catholic school was day after day of rote learning of multiplcation tables, from the 1 times up to the 12 times table. It started at 4 years of age, and seemed to go on for ever. I'll swear sometimes that that's all math instruction consisted of. That and long division. I can't still recite those damn things 40 odd years later, despite having acalculea.

[Deuce 1]

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is it possible that your experiences have led you to desire life to be neat, structured and orderly and you equate that with academic superiority?

My life is a total trainwreck if it is to be judged regarding order. ( see attached real time photo of my home office) My biggest reason for having my kids in my local Catholic school is the love that is there. At our parent-teacher conferences our teacher told each of our daughters "I love you", and she does. And we love her daughter and son, too. I suspect that in the public school system, if a teacher told a kid she loved him there would be some sort of discipline. It's just so cool to drop my kids off and have them exchange hugs with their 8th grade "Buddies" (bigger kids assigned to littler kids to help them out during the school year)

Aside from freefall, it's the thing I love most about skydiving. It's a loving, caring environment.

Orderly heirachical organizations are neat, and I admire them, but I've done extremely poorly in them on every occasion.

I was a cop for a long time, but that wasn't for order and heirarchy, it was for the opportunity to beat the shit out of bullies and kick them weeping into a corner where they begged the forgiveness of their victims.

See? There I go again. Poor impulse control.

[kallend 2,114]

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( see attached real time photo of my home office)

Piker! At least you still have room to move around and take a picture.

...

The only sure way to survive a canopy collision is not to have one.

[billvon 3,087]

You think that's bad?

[Deuce 1]

Nah, just making the point that I'm not the "in ordnung" type I may come off as.

As to your office: one thing...

Bill, you have an electric meter that runs backwards, water your yard with greywater, yet you don't use a reuseable ceramic mug for your beverage?

Infidel.

[Zenister 0]

hey look! i'm not the only one with a spectrum analyzer inexplicably sitting on the floor of his office....

no pictures sorry its in a SCIF.

____________________________________
Those who fail to learn from the past are simply Doomed.

[Deuce 1]

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ts in a SCIF.

That's like a small boat or something, right?

[Zenister 0]

somedays it feel very much like one yes....

secret compartmentalized infomation facility. no recording devices allowed...

____________________________________
Those who fail to learn from the past are simply Doomed.

[crwmike 0]

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is it possible that your experiences have led you to desire life to be neat, structured and orderly and you equate that with academic superiority?

My life is a total trainwreck if it is to be judged regarding order. ( see attached real time photo of my home office) My biggest reason for having my kids in my local Catholic school is the love that is there. At our parent-teacher conferences our teacher told each of our daughters "I love you", and she does. And we love her daughter and son, too. I suspect that in the public school system, if a teacher told a kid she loved him there would be some sort of discipline. It's just so cool to drop my kids off and have them exchange hugs with their 8th grade "Buddies" (bigger kids assigned to littler kids to help them out during the school year)

Aside from freefall, it's the thing I love most about skydiving. It's a loving, caring environment.

Orderly heirachical organizations are neat, and I admire them, but I've done extremely poorly in them on every occasion.

I was a cop for a long time, but that wasn't for order and heirarchy, it was for the opportunity to beat the shit out of bullies and kick them weeping into a corner where they begged the forgiveness of their victims.

See? There I go again. Poor impulse control.

Say three Hail Mary's and put $5 in the poor box.

[Deuce 1]

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Say three Hail Mary's and put $5 in the poor box.

I'll see your $5 and raise you one act of contrition.

[PhillyKev 0]

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Say three Hail Mary's and put $5 in the poor box.

I'll see your $5 and raise you one act of contrition.

Come on, go old school. I'll raise you one heretic for inquisition, and an adultress to stone

[crwmike 0]

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Say three Hail Mary's and put $5 in the poor box.

I'll see your $5 and raise you one act of contrition.

Come on, go old school. I'll raise you one heretic for inquisition, and an adultress to stone

Seems a waste of a perfect good adultress ...fold.

Michael

[tbrown 26]

I went to a parochial school up through 5th grade and then public schools ever after. The first two years in public school (6th & 7th grades), I felt like I'd flunked 5th grade over & over again. Aside from just the academics, I think we got a better morally grounded education than the public schools could, or would want to give. In the early sixties, the Catholic Church was deeply involved in the Civil Rights movement in the south and we had it drummed into us that God created all people equal with a soul, that black people were equal, and that racial prejudice was a sin. Which I don't think I'd have learned anywhere else in our overwhelmingly white working class neighborhood - certainly not at the public school, and certainly not on the moral level of a sin against God. Even if it was superficial by our later concepts of understanding race, it was a huge step ahead of the common views of the time.

I believe in public education because I have to, there are no alternatives for too many kids. But public schools so often suck. School officials with rotten prison warden mentalities, politically petrified School Boards, teachers with all the degrees, but little else to offer (I know there are some great teachers in public schools too, but they're usually run off when a younger teacher can be hired for less). Private and parochial teachers don't have all the degrees and certs, but they tend to have the vision and sense of mission.

On the downside, religious schools can easily go off the deep end with weirdo science classes that teach Noah's flood as scientific "fact". Or that the Pope is the anti-Christ, or that Catholics are diabolically evil. I know of some fundamentalist schools that actually teach that stuff. After all, look at what they're teaching kids in Muslim Madras schools around the world ("kill an American, go to heaven"). If it can happen there, it can happen here too.

But just because a right can be abused, doesn't mean we take that right away. Not in America. We just need to keep an eye on all of our schools and challenge what they teach our kids.

Your humble servant.....Professor Gravity !

[Deuce 1]

Dude. I loved that post.

Very sceptical. Like a true Jesuit.



Billvon has to be a Jesuit.

My Personal Jesuit was Father Edward Kominski. It was great. His nameplate on his door said Fr. Ed Kominski, so we all called him "Fred".

I was invited to a full scholarship at Notre Dame on the "Priest Plan" it was really attractive to me , bit more attractive was getting laid, and getting married. Preferably in reverse order, but unlikely in the 80's.

So, I got laid and got married and provided some children to the church who are amazingly unlikely to become nuns.