By JAMES K. FITZPATRICK
It was strictly coincidental, of course, but First Teachers featured a discussion about whether parents should be permitted to spank their children weeks before the story of Minnesota Vikings running back Adrian Peterson beating his four-year-old son became a national subject of discussion.
Our focus on September 11 was on whether the United States should follow the model of certain European countries that have made spanking illegal, or if doing so would be an unwarranted intrusion into parental authority. It must be stressed that no one quoted in the column suggested that beating a child with a stick, in the manner that Adrian Peterson is charged, should be condoned. But there were those who argued that it should be left up to parents to decide whether a slap on the hand or on the rear end is warranted in certain instances.
First Teachers was confident there would be a difference of opinion among our readers on this matter. A letter we received from E.B. of Walpole, Mass., is a case in point. E.B. informs us she is an “83-year-old grandmother.” E.B. relays an experience she had while babysitting her four grandchildren. She tells us her duties that day consisted of “mostly preparing lunch for them and cleaning up afterwards” until their parents came home from work.
“As I was doing one of these lunchtime tasks,” says E.B., “I was suddenly struck in the mouth by a Matchbox car thrown by the two-year-old.” (For those unfamiliar with Matchbox cars, they are small, but solid metal models of cars and trucks, popular with preteen children.) E.B. makes clear the young boy “didn’t throw it on purpose,” but that the “blow really hurt. I was very angry. I swatted my little grandson on his rear end. I didn’t think about it. I just reacted without thinking.”
At which point, the plot thickens. E.B. informs us that her oldest grandson said, “Grandma, now you have to apologize to him for hitting him.” The other two grandchildren agreed: “Our mother makes us apologize if we ever hit each other. So you should apologize, too.”
E.B. disagreed. She protested she was “not getting even” when she spanked the child. “I pointed out that a two-year-old can’t understand language and that he had to be taught that what he did was wrong by making life unpleasant for him when he did something like hurting someone for no reason at all. I pointed out to the older children that one smack on the bottom didn’t really hurt him. He wasn’t bleeding and didn’t have any bruises from the smack.”
Is this just a case of a generation gap? Not entirely. E.B. tells us her “husband disagrees with me completely on the topic. He says, ‘No spanking at all’.” E.B. adds that she and her husband have “six children and they all disagree with each other on the topic.” We welcome our readers’ reactions to E.B.’s story. Did E.B. do something wrong or something unobjectionable?
On another topic: Greg Kaza, executive director of the Arkansas Policy Foundation, has forwarded to First Teachers a review by Nathan Glazer of the recently published book Lost Classroom, Lost Community: Catholic Schools’ Importance in Urban America, by Margaret F. Brinig and Nicole Stelle Garnett. Glazer’s review appeared in the fall 2014 issue of the journal Education Next. (The Arkansas Policy Foundation is a nonpartisan, nonprofit organization that analyzes the impact of public policy on Arkansas. Its website can be accessed at arkansaspolicyfoundation.org.)
Glazer is a professor emeritus of education and sociology at Harvard University, highly regarded in secular liberal intellectual circles, perhaps best known for his book Beyond the Melting Pot: The Negroes, Puerto Ricans, Jews, Italians, and Irish of New York City. He collaborated with the late Daniel Patrick Moynihan in this effort.
In his review Glazer takes note of the large number of Catholic schools that have closed in American cities as a result of the Catholic migration to the suburbs and the decline in the number of teaching sisters and brothers. Parish schools, writes Glazer, “were forced to either close or adapt to a changing local population, which could not provide the same financial support as those departing.” The changing population of which he writes is largely black and Hispanic.
For a while, the Catholic schools survived and did an admirable job educating their new minority student bodies, whose parents were drawn to the Catholic schools “primarily because of the schools’ reputation for effective discipline, and in reaction to the observable disorder of their local public schools.”
But eventually “these schools were faced with a financial crisis” that made it impossible for them to stay open.
It is a familiar story. What Brinig and Garnett add to the scenario is the impact the closing of these schools had on the surrounding community, especially what they call the loss of “social capital,” which they define as “something that helps produce a good society: less crime, less disorder, more trust” and the “social networks and the norms of reciprocity and trustworthiness that arise from them.”
Brinig and Garnett provide data that demonstrate a link between the closing of Catholic schools in cities such as Chicago and Philadelphia and neighborhoods that became “more disorderly, and less socially cohesive,” with a significant increase in crime, violence, drug use, and gang-related activity.
Glazer then asks the question that begs to be asked of government leaders and policymakers: “If Catholic schools have such effects, one must raise the question…of why these schools cannot get public funds. They do as good a job of educating their students as public schools, perhaps better. But while voucher programs, for example, have overcome legal prohibitions in some states, political resistance to the flow of substantial public funds to schools not under the control of local public school districts remains intense.”
It is hard to come up with an answer for why this resistance is so hard to overcome, other than an anti-Catholic animus. There is little opposition to government aid for students attending Catholic colleges — Pell Grants, scholarships for military veterans, student loans, etc. Why the difference with Catholic elementary and high schools? Is it simplistic to conclude it is because many Protestant colleges benefit from the government assistance to their students? Students at Protestant colleges around the country, such as Baylor University (Baptist), Southern Methodist University, and Gettysburg University (Lutheran) get government assistance, not just students at Catholic colleges. So do students at Yeshiva University, a Jewish institution.
Government aid to students at religiously affiliated elementary and high schools, on the other hand, would go mainly to Catholic schools, due to the relatively small number of Protestant-run and Jewish-run schools at the pre-college level.
In other words, it appears to be not the principle of separation of church and state that is at issue, as much as a resentment over Catholics receiving what some consider a “disproportionate” share of taxpayer dollars. It is hard to locate the justice in that resentment. If Catholic elementary and high schools would benefit more than those run by other religious groups from taxpayer assistance to their students, it is because they are providing a greater public good.
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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.
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