We Have Met The Enemy

A lot of Catholic parents detest dating. According to these parents, dating encourages the participants to get used to frequent breakups, emotional roller coasters and psychologically prepares them for divorce.

Perhaps it does all of those things.
But the problem isn't with the dating.
The problem is with the Catholic parents.

Is Kellmeyer Crazy?

As I've pointed out in other posts, parents in post-industrial societies like our own infantilize their children. In pre-industrial society, 12-18 year olds were treated as adults. For centuries, canon law allowed 12-year old women and 14-year old men to marry (today, canon law has raised the age... to 14 and 16, respectively). Pagan Rome, where the average age of marriage for women was 14, had allowed the same thing, ages before Christ founded the Church. In fact, nearly every pre-industrial society on the face of the earth allowed what the Church allowed. Indeed, a recent survey of hunter-gatherer societies show the average age of marriage was 14 for girls and 21 for boys.  

Twelve-year old men were apprenticed and learned a trade - they were expected to be masters at their craft and able to support a family by age 18. For centuries, that's exactly what at least half the population did - women were married by age 16, men were married by age 18. 

Now, I know your first rebuttal, and it is wrong. Medievals weren't all mostly dead by the age of thirty.  Early marriage was not permitted because everyone died at age 30. Everyone thinks nobody made it to fifty because no one understands what "median age" means.

Any medieval who made it to age 10 was likely to live to be 50. The median age of death was in the low 20s and 30s for medievals because a lot of medieval children died in their first few years. This high early childhood death rate dragged the median death age artificially down.

In point of fact, if a person was able to survive the nutrition and health problems of medieval childhood, s/he was as likely to make it to 50 then as anyone born in modern-day Russia is today.

What changed?

Well, with industrialization, we decided to use a different kind of educational system. We pretty much scrapped apprenticeships and went for mass public schools. This new method warehouses children through age 18, keeps them out of the workforce and out of job competition with older adults. It also infantilizes them.

But it didn't used to be that way. In colonial Mexico, for instance, "More than half the Indias are married by the time they turn 16....using Nahua censuses for some Morelos villages around 1540, McCaa has built a strong case for child marriage. There were girls married before ten; mean age could stand between 12 and 14.(9) In all likelihood, the introduction of Christian marriage, with its threshold of 12 years for wedding girls, brought about a small rise in mean age at marriage for Indias.... At the age when half the girls (16) and the boys (18) were already married, both parents were alive in three cases out of four.(12) Adult mortality did not explain precocity of marriage." A Nahua source with very complete lineage and demographic information concludes, "Here, we find no unmarried individuals above fifteen years of age."

St. Rita married at age 12. The Blessed Virgin is assumed to have been about 12 to 14 when she got pregnant with Jesus. Edward Longshanks married at 15 to his 13-year old second cousin, Eleanor of Castile. They had 14 children. St. Elizabeth of Hungary married at age 13 and had her first child at age 15. Chrysostom said young men should marry as soon as possible (before they turn 20), to keep them out of the whore houses and theaters.

Why were saints marrying and having children at what we would consider a very young age? As I point out in my book:

[Did not St. John Chrystosom say] “What greater work is there than training the mind and forming the habits of the young?” Indeed he did. But the Latin reads “Ouid maius quam animis moderari, quam adolescentulorum fi ngere mores?” (emphasis added). That is, Chrysostom was referring to the education of teenagers. This is quite clear from the context of the homily in which the sentence appears, a homily in which the saint is at pains to point out:

The fathers are to blame. They require their horse-breakers to discipline their horses, they do not permit the colt to remain untamed. Instead, they put a rein and all the rest upon it from the beginnings. But their children? These they overlook. They allow their children to go about for a long season unbridled, and without temperance, disgracing themselves by fornications and gamings and attending the wicked theaters. Before the fornication began, they should have given their son to a wife, to a wife chaste, and highly endowed with wisdom. Such a wife will bring her husband away from this disorderly course of life, and will be instead a rein to the colt…. Do you not know that you can do no greater kindness to a youth than to keep him pure from whorish uncleanness? (Homily #59 on Matthew 18).

Chrysostom knew something we have forgotten.

We all remember that marriage is meant for the procreation of children and the unity of the couple. But we rarely recall - because no one ever teaches it - that marriage also serves a third and critically important purpose. Holy Marriage is the salve for concupiscence, the remedy for our tendency towards the sin of lust.

Why do you think our society is so steeped in sexuality? It is due in part to the fact that our society does not allow teenagers to get married. Teens want what they are made for - marriage and the procreation of children - but they can't have it. So society tantalizes them with what they can't have: a stable family, a good sex life, with themselves as the heads of that family, loving their spouses.

Conclusion
You see, when your 12 or 14-year old dates, they really do expect that they are finding a mate. If society, including their Catholic parents, left them alone, and didn't push post-industrial expectations of higher education, better jobs, etc., upon them, these teens really would get married at 14 or 15, as men and women that age have for thousands of years.

They would get married as the Church permitted them to for thousands of years.
They would get married as St. John Chrysostom recommended they should over 1500 years ago.

But as a modern, responsible Catholic parent, you won't allow them to marry at age 12, 14 or 16. They cannot imitate St. Rita of Cascia, or St. Elizabeth or the Blessed Virgin. You won't allow it.

If they start getting "too serious", you will actively step in and forbid them seeing that young man or woman so often, or perhaps, even forbid them meeting at all. You will break them up. It doesn't matter if they have a true vocation to marriage to that person. You will make sure it is delayed or destroyed. Catholic parents don't want early marriage and dozens of grandchildren from their only daughter or only son. Rather than allow the marriage, or encourage the couple to stay together to get married at age 14 or 15, the parents will either provide no support or actively encourage the couple to breakup.

And so the young men and women will be emotionally overwrought, they will go through innumerable breakups, they will spend the next ten or twenty years preparing themselves for the divorce that comes from marrying the wrong person. This will not result because of dating, but precisely because we will not allow them to marry.

Now, I'm not saying that you necessarily should allow your children to marry at age 14. I'm just pointing out that the problem with dating is not dating - it is the parents. Parents don't have the same expectations for their children they had prior to the industrial revolution.

So don't go blaming the culture for corrupting our children.

If anything, we are the ones who actively contribute to our children's corruption, because we go along with society's expectations for our children. We helped set up today's currently highly sexualized culture, we keep our children from marrying young so that they have to endure the tantalization for years, even decades, and we expect them to live as celibates without a community to support them or a vow of celibacy to give backbone to their lifestyle.

Yeah, the people corrupting our children?
That would be us.

PS
An excellent article, recommended in the comments, and worth reading.

Additional references:
Treating Teens like Toddlers
Does Society Infantilize Teens
Driving Teens Crazy
The Case Against Adolescence

PPS.

Interesting stats here. According to this article, the divorce rate among teen couples has dropped to match that of adults. It's almost as if the Internet and smart phones makes teens mature faster.

2021 divorce rate for 15-25 was 19.7

2021 divorce rate for 25-34 was 19.4 

2021 divorce rate for 35-44 was 18.1

Women are now LESS LIKELY to get divorced between 15 and 24 then they are between 25 and 44.

The divorce rate for teenagers is now indistinguishable from that between 30-year olds. Either teenagers are maturing faster, are adults are becoming less mature.

Given that divorce rates dropped, it seems that smart phones and the Internet might be making teens MORE MATURE FASTER. 

That is counter-intuitive.

 

Woman's Work

Elizabeth Wurtzel, a woman writing for The Atlantic, argues that raising children is not work since no one will pay you to do it.  Real feminism, according to her understanding, is to have employment that is equal in respect and pay to that of a man.

As I pointed out in previous posts, this conclusion makes sense.

Prior to the increases in hygiene and nutrition that occurred along with the industrial revolution, women had a very tough job. They had to conceive, carry, bear and raise children.  Roughly 20% to 30% of their children would not survive the first year. In certain subpopulations, upwards of 75% would not survive long enough to get married themselves. Women had to bear enough children to compensate for those losses. And they only had about 12 years to get it done. That's how long, on average, a marriage lasted before either the father or the mother or both, were dead. So, if any children were to survive to adulthood, women had to be pregnant on a fairly regular basis.

If a crop of wheat failed, it meant everyone in the village would starve for a year.
If a crop of children failed, it meant the village disappeared.
Women's work mattered.

In 2012, a child is about 40 times more likely to survive to adulthood than it  was in 1812.
That's an enormous increase in the efficiency of women's work. When production becomes more efficient, both the price and the value of the good drops.

It used to take enormous skill and luck to bring a crop of children to maturity, and able to enter their own marriages. It takes no skill to produce and raise them anymore. Children are no longer valuable.

So, the social value of women's work - raising children - is very much lower than it was in the past. Modern medicine, nutrition and production have made raising children among the lowest paying of occupations.  If women want to remain valuable in the eyes of society, they have to switch from child-bearing and child-raising  to a more difficult occupation.

Thus, the liberal fixation with "the war on women" has a real economic basis. Those who fixate on this sense that women's work is not valued as it used to be, that it can never again be valued as it was. The only way it will ever again be perceived as "hard work" is if we involuntarily return to a 75% loss rate before maturity.

And this explains the interest in keeping abortion legal. The economists attempted to increase the value of women's work by legalizing abortion. Abortion was legalized at the end of the post-war baby boom - when infant mortality rates had dropped to about 20 per thousand and the country was awash in kids. Too many kids. The cost of children had to be raised.

Abortion imposes an arbitrary 30% loss rate on children before birth. Put another way, legal abortion has returned our infant mortality rates to pre-industrial levels. Demographers do not point this out publicly. It belies the idea of our being "medically advanced." It's embarrassing.

It also hasn't worked. Women's work, the raising of children, is still too efficient. Survival rate of born children to maturity is still 40 times higher than it was two centuries ago. Attempts have been made to allow infanticide, but those haven't yet been successful. Given most people's squeamishness about murdering visible children, it is unlikely to have the necessary levels of success anytime soon.

On some level, Elizabeth Wurtzel and her friends recognize all of this. They insist there is another gambit, a better gambit, that women must employ: end participation in the "women's work" game entirely. They got out of the child-bearing business and they encourage other women to get out of the business as well. Women control the means of production, but too many women refuse to quit producing. From Wurtzel's point of view, women having children are traitors to their sex because their refusal to raise the clearing price of children by limiting supply is reducing the general value of "women's work" throughout society.

You see, even if Wurtzel's work has nothing to do with children, the very fact that so many women do want to have children encourages her employer to treat her as someone who is statistically likely to abandon her job in exchange for pregnancy. Men are statistically unlikely to do that, so men don't get profiled this way.  Stay-at-home moms encourage employers to "profile" all women.

In order to get around this perception, there have been various attempts to divorce women from child-bearing and child-raising entirely.  Free or low-cost child care, cradle-to-18 "schooling",  "it takes a village" sloganeering, all kinds of methods have been used to break the mother-child bond, to get all the women into the public workforce, to get them out of the piece-work of bearing and raising children. If it were successful, this would allow the annual child crop to be undertaken entirely by a regulated industry or the government. This is the goal. This is ultimately why research into artificial wombs, artificial gametes, etc., is subsidized and encouraged.

But we don't have artificial wombs yet. Ultimately, employers are not wrong to profile. Some women really do need to leave the public workforce and produce children if the nation is to survive.  Like the pre-industrial village, a nation without children disappears. The wage gap cannot be avoided.

But there is also irony here. While there is, indeed, a wage-gap, it only amounts to about 5 cents on the dollar. As Wurtz herself points out, women have already taken advantage of the efficiencies. 70% of women with children work. Fully employed mothers spend 86% as much time with their children as unemployed moms. How is that possible? How can a woman who spends 40 hours a week working spend "86% as much time with their children as unemployed moms"? Well, nowadays the children work too. They're at school thirty-five hours a week.

So, how much is raising children worth? Apparently, about five cents on the dollar. But there is another way to raise that price.

Wurtz, in her fixation on the corporate world, misses an option that many women have already figured out. Home-based businesses can be worth the time if the units produced are hand-crafted and high-demand. Artisan hand-crafted children, also known as homeschooled children, are becoming more popular precisely because they return value to "women's work." If Wurtz were a real feminist, she would promote homeschooling as a real alternative. If she were a real feminist. 

Obama Chooses Irrelevance

Over one hundred years ago, the bishops of America had a choice.
They could spend the bulk of their effort catechizing adults, as the Church Universal had done through most of her history, or they could imitate the public school system of the United States and spend the bulk of their catechetical efforts on teaching children the Faith.

They chose the children.
This choice to ignore the adults began their long but inevitable slide into irrelevance. Today, the bishops produce encyclicals that no one reads, trying to save schools that no one sends their children to. By focusing the bulk of their effort on children, the bishops implicitly admitted - whether they meant to or not - that they had nothing of particular substance to offer adults.

In just a few short days, Barack Hussein Obama will follow the lead of the American bishops. For the first time ever, an American President will spend an hour addressing America's schoolchildren.

It is of signal interest that he chooses to do this only after being his vaunted health plan was relentlessly savaged and torn to bits by political commentators and man-in-the-pew adult citizens during the August recess.

The facts speak for themselves.
Barack Obama has begun his own long slide into irrelevance.

This does, however, raise a disturbing question.

For the American bishops, the slide of formerly great office into relative obscurity was marked by increasingly irresponsible behaviour, culminating in the twin scandals of American Catholic education and priestly sexual abuse.

As the President destroys himself, what kind of behaviour can we expect from a this man, a man whose shocking narcissism already outpaces even that of his predecessors?

The dangers increase as the shadows lengthen.

Why Catholic Schools Are Pernicious

This remarkable letter from a Catholic parent on her child's Catholic school pretty much sums up why Catholic schools don't work. After complaining about how her child's previous school closed and how she is paying through the nose and still being asked to contribute more, she remarks:

Why am I being asked to contribute to upgrading the cathedral and the seminary? Church attendance is down and few are entering the priesthood.

Perfect!
Excellent!
Exactly!

Like most Catholic parents, this Catholic parent sees no connection between her child's education and the mission of the Church!

Priests? Bah! Who needs 'em?

Just give me a decent school for my kid!
The Church itself can go to hell, and I don't care.

She completely ignores the fact that her reasoning towards the seminary also applies to the parochial school her son attends. Why are parishioners being asked to support the Catholic school? Enrollment is down and few are entering! Why should anyone give a dime to these institutions that so signally fail to pass on any understanding of or appreciation for the Faith, how it works, what it does?

Ah, but the delicious irony of her sentiment is lost upon this parent, herself a product of the institution!

And what, exactly, does the bishop mean when he says he isn't getting out of the education business anytime soon? Of course he is getting out of it! Catholic school enrollment is dropping steadily each year. When he can't entice anymore students into the schools, he'll have to shut them down! The economic downturn is merely accelerating a pre-existing downward spiral. He's getting out of the brick-and-mortar grade school business whether he wants out or not.

Sigh.
What do they teach them in school nowadays?

Where Catholic Education Is Headed

As the economy tanks and Catholic schools continue to close due to lack of interest, Catholic bishops have begun slamming together blue-ribbon panels in an effort to fix the problem. Will it work?

No.

Currently, the Catholic school system is the largest private school system in the nation. By 2012, there will be more homeschooled students than any other kind of private school student in the nation. Parents are slowly returning to their roots. The days of the warehouse school are numbered.

To see why, we need only look at history, using Catholic education as our model. There are a lot of ways to discuss the history of Catholic education. For today's reflections, I will divide it up into four phases: pre-printing press, pre-industrialization, pre-Internet and Internet.

Period I - Pre-Printing Press: The Ascension to 1450.
During this period, there were two forms of education: one for children, a different kind for adults. Prior to the printing press, the creation of a book was a one-off, highly expensive undertaking. A book the size of the Bible could cost as much as the church in which it was kept. Consequently, literacy rates were low and most children didn't get much training in that particular skill.

While Romans and Greeks not uncommonly brought in tutors to educate their children, Jewish households homeschooled. For the first 1500 years of the Church, Catholics tended to follow Jewish tradition. Children were taught by their parents. While Catholics did establish schools, these were almost exclusively oriented towards educating adults, training them in adult skills like literacy.

Keep in mind the definition of "an adult." Until the Industrial Revolution in the 18th and 19th centuries, anyone twelve or older was considered an adult. Most people married and started their family somewhere between the ages of twelve and twenty. Indeed, an unmarried twenty-year old, especially a woman, who was not a member of a religious order was considered odd.

Unbaptized adults were taught the Faith in a several-year long process. After baptism, adult instruction was dedicated to the trivium (grammar, rhetoric, dialectic), and the quadrivium (arithmetic, geometry, astronomy, music). "Grammar schools" were called that because they taught grammar first.

For the first 1000 years, there were no parish schools because there were no parishes. Most schools were built around monasteries and cathedrals (one cathedral per city). Provision was made for poor adult students who did not want to enter orders but did want to learn. Still, training in literacy was mostly confined to those under religious vows: clerics. That's why we still refer to "clerical staff" today.

By the tenth century, parishes were being erected, generally around monasteries and monastic schools in the countryside. In the cities, universities came into existence around the twelfth century: Salerno, Bologna and Paris in the twelfth century, Oxford by 1170. These universities dedicated themselves to three main subjects: theology, the law, and eventually medicine.

Period II - Pre-Industrial: 1450 to 1800’s
The invention of the printing press and the discovery of America fueled a sea-change in education. The printing press allowed inexpensive books. Literacy became affordable for most people. It also made heresy much more pernicious. Once most people could read a book themselves, without an instructor, they could also interpret that book in ways the book was never meant to be read.

Historically, nearly every major heresy the Church faced came from a priest or a bishop, i.e., someone who was both literate and had influence. Their literacy allowed heretical priests to mis-read the Book, their influence allowed them to spread this mis-reading widely. But, for the first time ever, unbridled literacy allowed the theologically insane to seriously distort Catholic society in a much more profound way than had ever been possible earlier.

The Council of Trent agreed that children should be taught, but it did not advocate the creation of schools for children. While it did ask priests and parents to offer regular instruction in the Faith, literacy education was left to the marketplace.

Trent created exactly one new kind of school - a training school for priests called a "seminary." Eventually, every diocese was supposed to have it's own seminary for priestly formation. Theoretically, this would head off theological insanity among priests.

But by now, literacy was so cheap it could even be affordably taught to most children. Martin Luther, an Augustinian priest, was one of the first to realize that the best way to spread his crazy ideas was to propagandize children. His small catechism was designed in a question-answer format for children, he advocated church-state separation, and he pushed for children to be educated at the earliest possible age.

With the discovery of the Americas also came the discovery of its indigenous peoples.During the previous 1500 years, the Church had placed almost all its effort into evangelizing adults. For the first time since 380 AD, when the Catholic Faith became the official faith of the Roman Empire, the Church faced a large number of un-baptized peoples who would listen (Moslems didn't listen).

Now that cheap books were available, She began to put some effort into directly teaching children (i.e., those under the age of 12). She set up a new kind of school: the mission school. Mission schools were dedicated to teaching unbaptized adults and children the tools they needed to enter civilized society, which now included literacy. These schools were also meant to prepare children and their families for eventual baptism.

The Church had always promoted literacy, creating written Germanic and Slavonic long before Gutenburg's birth. But, while literacy was wonderful in helping to spread the Faith, it also created enormous difficulties. Increased literacy increased the probability of doctrinal distortion. So, over the course of time, the Church developed some rules for how schools should work in order to limit the distortions:

• All teachers must be Catholic (the term “professor”, which means "one who professes the Catholic Faith" comes from this rule),
• The Catholic Faith must permeate every aspect of the curriculum,
• Baptized and unbaptized students must be kept strictly separated,
• Girls and boys must be taught separately.

In Europe, literate Catholics tried to teach illiterate Catholics both literacy and Faith. Missionary societies meant to minister to illiterate Catholics spring up everywhere: the Jesuits are the most well-known: in 1540, Spain was still considered a mission field. While teaching groups like the Dominicans had existed prior to the printing press, the most of the great teaching orders come into existence only AFTER the invention of the printing press

Back in the Americas, Catholic missionaries flooded in, trying to teach the illiterate natives through mission schools. They are everywhere: both coasts, the Midwest, South America.

They create their own problems. The Jesuit schools in South America are so successful at civilizing the natives that the entire Jesuit order is eventually suppressed. After all, it is nearly impossible to enslave well-educated natives, and the Jesuits were creating far too many well-educated natives to suit Moslem-influenced Catholic slavers in South America.

Protestants, who were, by definition, almost all literate, settled primarily on the Eastern seaboard of North America. They ignore the Indians, using them only for occasional trade or killing them when they get in the way. Protestant schools are meant for literate Christians. The "school year" is generally only about 12 weeks long, and they really only provide "finishing" skills - students are expected to have been taught literacy and basic math at home before they enter. By the mid-1800’s, these schools are becoming Protestant evangelization centers against waves of poor Catholic immigrants.

During this time, higher education, like the Catholic university system, is still pretty much unique to Europe. In 1900, United States' high schools and universities will permit entry to no more than 2% of the population. Still, the entire population, being mostly Protestant, is extremely well-read, with a 100% literacy rate. Butchers and farmers read Thucydides and Plato.

Period III - Pre-Internet: 1870’s to about 1980’s
The advent of industrialization deeply affects education since industrialization requires the destruction of family artisans and crafts, splitting up the family. In country after country, effective industrialization follows the same pattern. First, children are legally forbidden to work. Then, the newly-idled children are legally required to attend warehouse schools to keep them off the streets while the industrial floor snaps up both parents for a 12-hour workday six to seven days a week.

Vatican I attempts to respond to effects of industrialization by promising a statement on marriage, but it is pro-rogued by the war of Italian unification. Over time, the wage-earning capacities of most adults, whether mother or father, are captured for the corporations.

As a result, family trades and stay-at-home work, the mainstay of the family for thousands of years, largely disappears. Family-based education is essentially wiped out. Family life is distorted in brand new ways.

Industrialists push for warehouse schools across the nation by appealing to Protestant leaders. Protestant communities are able to proselytize the hordes of Catholic immigrants through the schools. The Third Baltimore Council (1884) responds to the threat by mandating parish schools.

Unfortunately, the parish schools do not draw on the trivium, quadrivium tradition. Instead, they imitate the public school warehouse format. Protestants respond by outlawing Catholic schools around the country through Blaine Amendments.

Industrialists end-run both religious groups by subsidizing the creation of teacher "certification" programs and teachers’ unions, which in turn encourage the removal of religion from the curriculum entirely.

The teacher certification programs are meant only to instill in adults the ideas necessary to successfully warehouse children and school them in factory attitudes. Teachers are meant to manufacture factory workers, cogs in the machine, not students liberally educated in the trivium and quadrivium (the disaster that was Jesuit success in South America will not be repeated).

As I outline in my book, the factory schools (both Protestant public and Catholic private) together create America's modern contraceptive society. Seminaries were the first to collapse. Although every diocese is still supposed to have its own seminary, by the mid-1980's most American dioceses can't afford the expense. A handful maintain seminaries. The rest now export their priestly training.

Period IV – 1990’s to now
Once the contraceptive society is firmly established, the number of children in school necessarily flatlines. You can't enroll a child that doesn't exist. Today, with population rate of 2.1 (no growth), public schools experience essentially no growth, apart from the small increase or decrease obtained from the infusion of immigrants' children.

The population of “Catholic” schools not only flatlines, it has actually begun to drop. The reasons are straightfoward. The contraceptive society strips away not only Catholic children, but Catholic identity in general, so the raison d'etre for the Catholic schools disappear. Catholic "intellectuals" worked for years to get rid of the "Catholic ghetto." When the "Catholic ghetto" disappears, so does the Catholic school.

Catholic school losses can be attributed to essentially three major problem areas:
Social: The Desire to Integrate Into Protestant-Secular Society

• Even at their height, Catholic warehouse schools never had more than 50% of Catholic children. Most Catholics wanted to "get out of the ghettoes" and integrate into a largely non-Catholic society. They have succeeded.
  
• The post-Vatican II loss of Catholic identity means the already weak parental impetus to send children decreases. In order to stay open, schools need pupils - they invite in non-Catholic students.
  
• Today, nearly 15% of Catholic school students are non-Catholic. Catholic identity is further watered down to attract even more students in a vicious downward spiral.

Economic: Warehouse Schools Are Too Expensive

• Post Vatican II loss of religious orders means loss of cheap labor,
• Schools eat up parish income. School tuition is now nearly universal, further depressing demand,
• Catholic schools serve increasingly wealthy student population as only affluent parents can pay the bills. This further destroys the medieval Catholic ethos that required making room for poor Catholics.
  

Theological: "Catholic" Schools Aren't Catholic

• Loss of trivium and quadrivium (the classical education), means loss of Catholic identity,
• Most schools and parishes violate the Catholic principle of subsidiarity in sacramental education by removing sacramental instruction almost entirely from the parents' shoulders,
  
• Virtually no "Catholic" school adheres to the Vatican documents on Catholic education.
• Teachers are not restricted to actively practicing Catholics, but to whoever will take the pay.
• Children are not segregated along baptismal or belief status, nor according to sex.
• The curriculum is not permeated by Catholic viewpoint, it uses texts, teachers and teaching philosophy identical to that of secular schools.
• The Catholic Church now runs a string of private schools that are Catholic primarily in label, not content.
  

Like the seminaries before them, Catholic parochial schools are collapsing. To the extent that Catholic bishops realize all of this, most of them can't say any of it out loud because their flock doesn't want to hear it.

We've seen the effect of literacy and industrialization on Catholic education. What effects does/will the Internet have on all of this?

The Future
The internet allows home-based businesses. It also allows the dissemination of information at an even lower cost than the printing press and the public library. Information is now essentially free and parents can return to home employment as artisans/craftsmen to an extent that hasn't been seen since the mid-1800's. This is slowly being reflected in the effects on the nation's school systems.

The public schools per pupil cost hovers between $5000 and $10,000 depending on how the numbers are counted. The are not particularly effective at educating children, but then, that was never really their purpose. Their primary advantage is their ability to warehouse children while the parents work. As a secondary bonus, schools tend to disrupt family life, making all family members dependent on goods and services provided by corporations.

Today, Catholic schools comprise the single largest private school system in the nation. By and large, they do not handle special needs children. They lose 7-10% of their students every five years. Per pupil cost is about the same as public school when straight educational offering is compared. They are 37% more effective than public school in educational outcome. While there is slight growth in suburban areas (where the affluent clients live), that growth is more than offset by losses in the inner city and rural areas. Their primary advantages are their ability to warehouse children while the parents work, and to provide a better educational outcome than public school, albeit at an obvious direct tuition cost to the client.

Since 1999, homeschooling has experienced growth of 8% per year, every year. Per pupil cost is 5% of public school ($500 vs. $10,000) and 10% of Catholic school ($500 vs. $5000). Burgeoning Internet resources and on-line courses will only improve the cost numbers. It is nearly 75% more effective than public school in educational outcome, and 35% more effective than Catholic schools. The primary advantage is the educational outcome, albeit at an obvious direct cost: no two-income or single-parent use of homeschooling is really possible. Given the number of broken families in American society, this is a real roadblock to the growth of homeschooling.

Homeschooling transforms education from a school year endeavor controlled by corporate bureaucrats back into the year-round, home-based, family-centered pursuit that augmented the Church for nearly 18 centuries.

Today, the Catholic parochial school system is the largest single private educational entity (12% of total school population in 1960, 5% in 1990).

Given current trends, by 2012, the homeschooling population will be bigger than the population in the Catholic school system. Assuming Catholics comprise 25% of homeschoolers, by 2035, more Catholics will be homeschooled than will attend parochial school.

If Catholic bishops want to get on board, the train is leaving the station. The school model proposed by the Third Baltimore Council in 1884 has never really worked; at best it never schooled more than 50% of the Catholic children in the nation. Today it is slowly closing down.

Homeschooling is an imperfect return to an educational model that was successful for thousands of years. Given the demographics, it will probably be at least another decade before Catholic bishops can publicly move their support away from the dying Catholic school parochial system and decisively move toward support of Catholic homeschooling. Until then, bishops commission blue-ribbon panels to natter on about What Should Be Done (tm). And they wait.


The Numbers
In 2007, the number of homeschooled students was about 1.5 million, an increase from 850,000 in 1999 and 1.1 million in 2003. The percentage of the school-age population that was homeschooled increased from 1.7 percent in 1999 to 2.9 percent in 2007. The increase in the percentage of homeschooled students from 1999 to 2007 represents a 74 percent relative increase over the 8-year period and a 36 percent relative increase since 2003.

Homeschooling $500 per pupil cost
Year Enrollment Percent Increase
1999 850,000 or 1.7% of nation's total school population
2003 1.1 million
2007 1.5 million or 2.9% of nation's total school population.
36% increase since 2003, 74% increase since 1999

Catholic School $5870 per pupil cost $10,228 2ndary pupil cost
Year Enrollment
1998-1999 2,648,844
2003-2004 2,484,252
2008-2009 2,192,531 17.4% decline since 2000

84.5% of Catholic school population are Catholic students (1,852,635).
14.9% of Catholic school population are non-Catholic students ( 325,835).
This is an increase from 2.7% in 1970 and 11.2% 1980.

Public School K-8 Public School 9-12 Total Private School Enrollment
Year Enrollment Year Enrollment
1995 32.3 million 1995 12.5 million 1995 11.7% of public school total
2005 34.2 million 2005 14.9 million 2005 11.0% of public school total
2006 34.2 million 2008 15.1 million

Improving Catholic Education

With the economic downturn, a lot of Catholic schools are closing. Across the nation, priests and bishops are wringing their hands with concern. "We must save our Catholic schools!" they cry.

I have a simple proposal for not only saving Catholic schools, but dramatically expanding Catholic schools, and at only 5% the current cost.

Indeed, the solution is simplicity itself.
Give a $1000 scholarship per child to every Catholic homeschooling parent.

In numerous documents and public statements, the Vatican has made clear that only the family guarantees authentic education in values.

Obviously, the Catholic school does not guarantee an authentic education in values. Thus, in order to maintain Catholic education while keeping in accordance with the principle of subsidiarity, diocesan money should not go to schools, but directly to families. By subsidizing family homeschooling efforts, the family is strengthened.

The "social values" bishops should be all over this, right? I mean, they're always up in arms about a minimum wage, and putting money into direct subsidies. So put your money where your mouths are, gentlemen. Send money from the collection basket directly back to the Catholic families that homeschool.

"But the parents aren't qualified!" some of you may be shouting. Yes, I'm sure. But take a look at who is teaching theology in many of the Catholic schools around the nation. Certainly it isn't people with theology degrees. Indeed, often-times it isn't even a practicing Catholic who is given the task of teaching the Catholic Faith.

Besides which, when parents do the educating, qualifications stop making a difference. The most recent study of over 11,000 homeschooled students from around the nation shows that the homeschool provides 74% better educational outcomes then public schools, but at a cost of less than $500 per pupil per year (versus in excess of $10,000 per pupil for public schools). This improvement in outcome comes without regard to the number of college degrees the parents might hold and without regard to the household income.

In short, when parents teach their own children, both parties are so motivated that the usual measures for predicting academic success no longer apply. Family income, minority status, college education and certification, all of that is simply not relevant. I think it may have something to do with that whole "love" thing, but that's just an uninformed hunch.

In any case, if we give each homeschooling family a per child subsidy of $1000 per year, it would be generous according to their needs, but only one-fourth the cost of teaching that same child inside of a school whose grounds and staff must be maintained in the style to which they have become accustomed.

In short, the size of Catholic schooling across the nation could be increased four-fold without one dollar of additional expenditure, but with a nearly 75% jump in educational outcomes.

"But we need to simply support our Catholic parochial schools!" you might respond.

Really?

Why?

Catholic schools do perform 25% better than public schools, but the per child cost is actually the same as public schools when you compare dollars spent on a straight educational basis, without throwing in all the bells and whistles that public schools are required by law to maintain.

Indeed, with the advent of on-line learning, the whole institutional school experience is being revealed for exactly what it is - a prison system for underage children.

Our society maintains those buildings for exactly one reason: it wants to capture the dollar-generating potentials of both parents. In order to do that, the children must be warehoused from the earliest possible age, so that neither parent wastes their economic capacities on the family, but instead orients those dollar-generating abilities towards the corporation, where they properly belong. Elementary and pre-elementary schools are meant to orient everyone to build up the corporation, not the family.

Given what we already know about the capacity of homeschooling to improve educational outcome, given the tremendous resources afforded to every family at virtually no cost through the Internet, it is clear the school building still exists only because it's such a fine warehouse. It certainly isn't about education - that is blindingly obvious.

So, by giving direct grants to families, Catholic bishops would be getting a much better educational experience for Catholic students, they would be directly supporting the family using the social justice principles they have so loudly espoused in regards to the minimum wage, and they could increase the number of students involved in Catholic education by a factor of four with no additional outlay.

It has been my experience that people often know what is best for others and loudly tell them what it is when opportunity arises, "You need to pay your employees a living wage!" "Rich people should surrender part of their income to the poor!" etc.

Alright, bishops!

Now you have a chance to do with your diocesan funds exactly what you keep telling corporations they need to do with their funds: give out the money and give up a little direct control, in the sure knowledge - already demonstrated via several massive studies - that the new solution will provide better outcomes than the old.

So, I'll be waiting for that to happen.
I'm sure it will be quite soon.

Yep.

Any day now.

Pope Benedict's address to Catholic Educators

I haven't found much on what the Pope had to say on this subject, apart from this story from Catholic News Service.

I found three aspects of the excerpts I was able to find rather significant.

1) The first involves the Pope's reference to the reputation of Catholic schools in the United States:

"I know from my own days as a professor, and I have heard from your bishops and officials of the Congregation for Catholic Education, that the reputation of Catholic institutes of learning in this country is largely due to yourselves and your predecessors," he said.

Notice what he doesn't say. He doesn't say if that reputation was good or bad. He just said that the current instructors and their predecessors are responsible for the reputation Catholic education has now. That's quite a bit less of a statement than one might hope for.

2) President Lazarus, president of the University of Dallas, is reported to have been happy that the Pope emphasized the importance of academic freedom.

Those of you who heard the Guadalupe Radio Network broadcast on the blasphemy permitted on UD campus might recall that President Lazarus hid behind academic freedom. You might think I have egg on my face. Read the excerpt below and decide for yourself how accurate President Lazarus' summary of that portion of the speech seems to be:

He made one specific reference to Catholic college presidents, near the end of his address, telling them he wished to "reaffirm the great value of academic freedom." He also noted that any appeals to academic freedom "to justify positions that contradict the faith and teaching of the church would obstruct or even betray the university's identity and mission."

3) The Pope seems to have read my book (or I seem to have read Catholic documents fairly accurately - take your pick):

"Catholic identity is not simply a question of the number of Catholic students," he said. It also is not "dependent upon statistics" nor can it be "equated simply with orthodoxy of course content." Instead, he stressed that the Catholic identity of a school or religious education program "demands and inspires much more: namely that each and every aspect of your learning communities reverberates within the ecclesial life of faith."

I look forward to reading the whole speech when it is made available.

No news here

Sure, public school teachers are having sex with students, but "Out of the millions of teachers and millions of employees out there, you're talking about a very small number who are doing these inappropriate things," said Paul Houston, executive director of the American Association of School Administrators. "As long as we keep it in context, recognizing any kind of problem like this is always a good move."

Isn’t that nice? Charol Shakeshaft’s report on sexual abuse in the schools, a report commissioned by the Education Department under the No Child Left Behind act, shows that roughly 4.5 million (that’s right, million) students were sexually harassed or abused during the course of the last decade in the public school system. Roughly ten percent of school officials are believed to be molesters, and this number is believed to be low due to reporting bias.

In comparison, about four percent of priests in the last five decades were abusers. Those five decades created more than 11,000 abuse accusations against priests, of which 6,700 were substantiated, 1,000 were unsubstantiated, and the remainder were not investigated because the accused priests had died. Over half of the accused had only one accusation lodged against them, while 3 percent had 10 or more allegations. Seventy-eight percent of the alleged victims were between the ages of 11 to 17, while nearly 6 percent were 7 or younger.

4.5 million versus 11000.
One decade versus five decades.
Hmm....

That works out to 450,000 abuse cases from the public schools per year versus 220 abuse cases per year for priests or a difference of roughly 2000 percent.

Perhaps public school teachers should take vows of celibacy.

Educating the System

Educating the System

“The more things change, the more they stay the same.” It’s a French saying, and the French understand how the game is played.

The state of Illinois, like many states, is having a budget crisis. Allegedly, one great way of cutting back on expenses is to de-certify all private schools for athletic competition. This move will save the superintendent about $300,000 a year. Enough to pay ten teachers. Of course, it will also make hundreds of non-public schools in Illinois ineligible for many state and federal grants, hobble tens of thousands of non-public school student admissions to some colleges and universities, and deny the possibility of athletically based scholarships to these same students. But, you have to break a few eggs to make an omelet, eh?

Though the state now says non-public schools don't need their curricula examined, at least one regional superintendent in Illinois disagrees. Sort of. Despite the fact that the US Supreme Court recognizes home schooling as a perfectly legal and reasonable method of assuring your children’s education, this state official is willing to spend his department’s funds to thoroughly investigate the various curricula used by home schooling families throughout his region. He’s afraid student education at home might be worse than their education in the public school system. His deep concern touches the hearts of dozens of families, and has already brought many to tears.

For Catholics, none of this is surprising. The American public school system was specifically designed to enable this kind of abuse. Indeed, that’s why the Catholic parochial school system was created: Catholic bishops recognized the dangers inherent in the public schools and developed their own alternative. The state has never been very happy about that development, neither in this country nor elsewhere.

Back in the mid-1800’s, when the state began requiring schooling for all children, the proponents of the move had two motives. First, it was recognized that education improved productivity and general citizenship. Second, the huge wave of Catholic immigrants terrified most of Protestant America. The extremely influential Justice Hugo Black summed it up best when he referred to Catholics as "powerful sectarian religious propagandists" who were "looking toward complete domination and supremacy of their particular brand of religion." Compulsory public education in a Protestant environment was explicitly held up as an important tool towards stopping the infernal papists from taking over the country. Catholics had to be made to conform religiously.

As a result, only certain “acceptable” elementary schools were made eligible for public funding, and, lo! the only schools that qualified for funds were Protestant! Catholics yawned in amazement, and kept right on building their own schools. But even this was attacked. In 1889, Wisconsin made it illegal to send a child to an out-of-district (read parochial) school. By 1922, Oregon made it illegal to send a child to anything but a public school. The Ku Klux Klan lobbied in favor of such laws. So did the Republicans, for, by now, public school was good for business.

In the early 1900’s, public school had been partially re-engineered, adopting the Prussian system of schooling the lower classes. The Prussian system defined for the child what was to be learned, what was to be thought about, how long to think about it and when a child was to think of something else. Disciplines that were formerly an integrated whole were now broken up into artificial “subjects” to prevent the student from seeing the whole. Bells were used, not to enhance concentration on a subject, but to enhance obedience to bells. Industrial America needed workers who embraced repetition, responded to bells, and lived only for working the process and consuming the product. It was a new kind of conformity.

Jewish and Catholic immigrant families understood that this system of schooling was an offense against human dignity. Diane Ravitch’s book, The Great School Wars, documents the three week long riot that ensued after Andrew Carnegie tried to implement the Prussian system in New York. Though the Republican party had always been the anti-slavery party and a stronghold of immigrant support, the successful implementation of this method of schooling was one component which helped to destroy that support. The Prussian method, which viewed man as a machine to be harnessed, eventually destroyed the religious content of education, replacing it with the secular humanist bent that now pervades the system.

Today, teachers’ unions (ironically, “teacher certification” was also a Carnegie idea) have made the maintenance of the existing school system the province of the Democrats. Republicans, who made union-busting a national sport, have reversed their position and now support the underdogs: voucher-based education and the homeschooler. Now, not just Catholics, but all Christians are opting out of schools that push the new religion, secular humanism. And the system fights back, just as it did a century ago, attempting to use the courts and the laws to impose its worldview on families who don’t want it.

Alexis de Toqueville, at the beginning of the 1800’s, found America a most amazing country. Every farmer could read, and did so, balancing a book on the plow. It was not unusual to find the butcher conversant in Latin or Greek, the baker having an opinion on Plato or Descartes.

It is too bad the French are not always right. Times change. De Toqueville’s America is one thing that has truly changed, and is not likely to return. If the system has its way, that is.