Did you happen to notice on the news yesterday that Catholic School,

[mtnsnake]

the one that they said was the first school to re-open in the hurricane ravaged area? They showed a picture of the kids and their parents standing outside all happy and everything, with not one black child that I could see among them, of course.

Well it just reminded me that bold segments of segregation still exist, not just in the South but in the North, too. I'm Catholic (born one, but don't practice), and I've got Catholic relatives and friends. Some of them have what they think are good intentions religious-wise, but a few of them simply send their sons and daughters off to Catholic schools to keep their kids away from children of different colors.

Maybe I'm wrong, but I wonder sometimes what the underlying purposes of Catholic/Private schools really are.

[DemocratSinceBirth]

1. I Also See Some Of The Opposite..

Foks of color sending their kids to Catholic schools so they can be assured of getting a good education...

[mtnsnake]

5. Oh boy. If my wife, a public school teacher, reads that, she'll jump

right through the computer. In our area, the education at Catholic schools has been proven to be NO better than at public ones. In fact, some believe the opposite, but that's a debate for a different subject. :)

[NaturalHigh]

11. My wife teaches at a Christian school.

It's not a Catholic school (but my wife is Catholic). The test scores for kids in the school are consistently higher than those for students in the area's public schools. There is nothing wrong with wanting a quality education for your kids. Also, we don't have the drug problems that plague some of the nearby public schools, and we don't have a problem with teenage pregnancies. In fact, not one single girl has gotten pregnant since my wife started teaching there. Our kids love it there, and so does my wife.

[dflprincess]

15. Private schools can refuse to admit kids with

learning disabilities, behavorial problems and physical handicaps (a Catholic high school in this area just made the news for refusing to let a kid with MD attend). Public schools have to take everyone and try to meet the needs of all students while their staffs and budgets are being cut.

This would tend to skew test results.

[Davis_X_Machina]

2. Depends on the parish. White neighborhoods have white schools...

..whether secular or parochial.

When I taught in Boston, some parish schools, like St. Gregory's Dorchester, were majority non-white, and very nearly fifty-fifty Catholic-non-Catholic.

[shrike]

3. Plenty of Catholic schools have students of color

Depending on the region though, I suspect. I'm in the Midwest and can't speak for the south, or for other regions of the country.

My sister and brother went to Catholic High School in Detroit and a good part of the student population was Arab -- large Arab population in Dearborn; they sent their kids there because the school had such a good reputation. No conversions required, no mandatory mass attendance and the arab parents didn't seem to mind their kids having to sit through morning prayers. (Muslims and other non-Christians were not required to join in.)

I think at one point the school had more non-Christians than it did practicing Catholics.

[SmokingJacket]

4. They sprang up like spring flowers after the rain once desegregation

happened.

When I was a young public school teacher down south twelve years ago, I taught with both white and black teachers. NOT ONE white teacher sent her child to public school. All the black teachers did.

I'm sure many parents send their kids to private school because they believe they'll get a better education... but a whole lot of them do because they don't want their children mixing with the riff-raff.

[mtnsnake]

7. My former neighbor is one of those people who

"don't want their children mixing with the riff-raff".

He sent his daughters to Catholic school for the reason you mentioned and one of them actually ended up marrying a black man, much to the father's demise. He and that daughter have had a very strained relationship since, to say the least.

[ret5hd]

6. well, as a product of 9 yrs of catholic school...

(and a now avid atheist)
i can say that education is ONE reason...after 9 years of catholic school, my remaining 3 years (in public school) were strictly on coast...i can honestly say that i learned next to nothing those last 3 years.

also, at the catholic school i attended, there were a small number of blacks, and even one jew that attended during my time there. there was only a requirement that the family was from the parish or a surrounding parish without a catholic school...you didn't have to be a member of the church, or of any race, etc to attend. you did have to agree that the child could attend the (daily) religion classes and attend mass (during school hours) on the holy days. the school had a sliding-rate system to accomodate those with lower incomes.

the class sizes were small, and taught by dominican nuns when i was there...now by certified teachers, as there aren't many nuns left. very strict, but i wouldn't change a thing. they taught me how to THINK...which i think has led to me being an atheist.

[ret5hd]

8. i guess rhetoric and flame-fanning was funner than discussion. (nt)

[Cleita]

13. I don't blame you. I was taught by Dominicans at first in

elementary school. They were more into discipline than teaching IMHO.
I did go to public school for awhile and actually asked my parents to go back to Catholic school because the nuns did keep order in the classroom so you could learn. Also, other orders of nuns were more into teaching than discipline like the Dominicans.

I feel for the most part I got a good education from them, but in college it was time to move on to a more secular education.

[Lydia Leftcoast]

9. The original purpose of Catholic schools (19th century) was

self-protection.

In those days, most Catholics were recent immigrants from Ireland and Eastern and Southern Europe and therefore despised by the descendants of British and Northern European immigrants who had come earlier.

The public schools were dominated by the earlier immigrants, and they decided to push the Protestant version of Christianity in the schools in order to "Americanize" the Catholic students, (This is where the old school prayer laws in the Northeast came from.) There were actual political action groups (the Know-Nothings and the Ku Klux Klan) that were anti-Catholic and anti-new-immigrant.

The Catholics decided to start their own schools in order to counteract the Protestant-dominated schools' attempts at conversion and to provide a haven for the new immigrants who were having a hard time in the public schools.

[Cleita]

10. When I went to rich bitch Catholic boarding school in the fifties, there

was one African American girl among the day students in the whole high school of about 3,000 students. I was the kind of kid who was always questioning my teachers about everything that seemed weird asked about it and was mostly ignored. My dorm nun, who lived with us and was closer to us than the regular nuns, explained that she was an experiment to see how she integrated with the other students. If it went well, they would admit more. The boarding part of the school seemed to have no such restrictions as there were plenty of Mexican girls from rich families.

This high school was not cheap and it seemed to me if the parents could afford, the books, lab fees, tuition and uniforms, there shouldn't have been a problem about what color they were.

[LeftyMom]

12. The Catholic schools around here are very diverse

some more than others, but as they pull from wider areas than neighborhood public schools all the ones I know of have a wide mix of students.

Back when I was in high school (not too long ago, I'm in my 20s) we would to go to the one of the Catholic girls' schools for competitions and it was a very diverse place with a fair percentage of the students were muslim girls in head scarves. I was told the religious content was restricted to Friday afternoons and there was an option to go to ethics class instead of chapel.

Perhaps the reason the kids depicted were mostly white is because theirs were the unaffected neighborhoods and the kids from more diverse or majority-black neighborhoods can't safely return yet?

I'd rather send my kid to Catholic schools than public ones, although neither would be my first choice and I'd prefer not to send him to school at all. I'm not the slightest bit religious.

[markus]

14. In NOLA in the 1960s, the purpose of the Catholic Schools

was to provide a safe haven, a sort of internal white flight, from desegration.

I'm sure there are very fine people invovled in Catholic education (not that I met any in 12 years) who will argue otherwise.

They are delusional.