Catholic Students As Leaven In Public Schools

By JAMES K. FITZPATRICK

An article in the Mach 6 issue of The American Conservative brought back memories of a question I haven’t thought about in decades: whether it would be a noble undertaking for Catholic parents to “save” their local public schools by enrolling their children in those schools, rather than in Catholic schools. The article by Rod Dreher was entitled “The Missionary Approach to School.”
Dreher used his article to respond to a seminarian who wrote on his Facebook page that he disagreed with Christian parents “who try to mandate and/or justify sending their kids or others’ kids to public school so that their children can ‘be a witness’ in an otherwise hostile environment.”
The seminarian argues that it is a mistake to see education as “primarily a missional rather than a catechetical endeavor”; that a parent’s responsibility is the intellectual and moral development of his or her children, and that it is misguided to risk those ends in an effort to “uplift” other children in the community. Especially, when it is questionable whether their children’s presence in local public schools can accomplish that task.
Dreher agrees with the seminarian. He doesn’t believe that the “salt and light argument” holds water because “peer pressure is so great, the popular culture itself is so toxic, and kids are such herd creatures.” He asks us to consider the likelihood that Christian children will have their faith endangered, rather than that they will serve as a leaven to the “toxic” atmosphere, “antithetical to Christian values” found in many modern public schools.
But Dreher notes, “It depends on the school and the kid. It is hard to generalize.” Beyond that, he understands that the question of sending Christian children to public schools cannot be escaped in every instance:
“Most people can’t afford private or religious school, and home-schooling is not something most people can do well. If not for my wife, my kids would almost certainly be in public school, because I would be an extremely incompetent home-schooler. It’s hard to do, and even harder to do well. And I think one of my kids would do well in public school; the other two, for developmental reasons, would struggle.”
Dreher ponders what will happen if the “day may come when, for financial or other reasons, we will no longer be capable of home-schooling, and will send our kids to public school.”
It was this last comment that struck a chord with me. I can remember, back during the years I was a public high school teacher in the suburbs of New York City, talking to many neighbors who wrestled with the same question that Dreher raises. Many of my neighbors’ children attended the public school where I taught. Quite a few of them were friends of my children and classmates of theirs at our parish elementary school.
I never knew exactly what to say when my neighbors talked of the dilemma they faced because they could not come up with the tuition at the Catholic high schools in the area, especially if they had three or four or more children. (Our parish school tuition was small in comparison to what the local Catholic high schools charged.) And the Catholic high school tuition back then was a tiny fraction of what it is today. For the purposes of this column, I looked up the tuition at the Jesuits’ Fordham Prep in the Bronx. It is nearly $18,000 per year. That is a tough nut to cover, especially if you have two or more children attending at the same time.
I would hear people fretting about what would happen to their children once they got to the public high school and were separated from their Catholic school friends who were going to Catholic high schools. You could hear hints of some resentment from them over the Catholic families who had “given up” on the community’s public schools, of how much better the public high school would be if a solid nucleus of Catholic children were among the student body. They didn’t use the terms “leaven” and “salt and light” that Dreher used in his article, but that is what they meant.
They were saddened by the prospect of their children being left without the daily presence in their lives of their Catholic elementary school friends; also by the vision they had of how much improved the public school would be if the Catholic children were part of the student body.
A not irrelevant aside: I can remember being at a basketball game between the local public school and the nearby diocesan high school. The Catholic school won handily. After the game, as the trophies were being handed to the winning players, the announcer, an administrator at the public high school, went out of his way to point out that two of the stars from the Catholic high school were residents of the local public school district and could very well have been on the public school team that had just lost. He said it with a smile, but there was no question that he was making a point.
It was a message that resonated with me. My children went to the local Catholic high school, but I can remember thinking to myself — when I saw several of their elementary school friends on the school’s honor roll or talking and laughing together in the lunchroom at the public school where I taught — that it would not have been bad if they had attended the public school because of the solid group of their friends among the student body.
I had the same thought as I watched the six children of one of our parish lectors go through their four years of high school. This man and his wife were deeply troubled when they realized that, even though they were able to keep their children in attendance at our parish elementary school, there was no way they could pay the Catholic high school tuition for their large family.
But their children flourished in the public school. They excelled academically, earning scholarship assistance to Catholic colleges such as Fordham, Boston College, and Holy Cross. Perhaps more important, they remained “good kids,” participating in the public school’s many athletic and extracurricular activities, along with many of their Catholic elementary school friends. I don’t know if I would go so far as to contend that they were a “leaven” to their public high school, “salt and light” for their classmates, but they made the school a better place.
Of course, that would not likely have been the case if they had attended a crime-ridden inner-city high school. As Dreher put it so well, it “depends on the school and on the kid.”
Yes, there is another side to this story. I also saw Catholic elementary school children from families that I knew were coming under the influence of students at the public school who were involved in questionable activity. Am I sure these young people would not have followed a similar path if they had attended Catholic high school? No. Everyone knows that not every student at a Catholic high school stays on the straight and narrow.
Unfortunately, there is no sure-fire, universally applicable answer to these problems. We all have heard of children from the same family who have attended the same schools following markedly different paths during their teenage years.

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Readers are invited to submit comments and questions about this and other educational issues. The e-mail address for First Teachers is fitzpatrijames@sbcglobal.net, and the mailing address is P.O. Box 15, Wallingford CT 06492.