Our children come out of the womb and start crying so we feed them. Sometimes it seems like all they want to do is eat, cry, and that other thing which we’re not even going to talk about.
They cry at night and we get out of bed to check on them. We check on them when they’re making strange noises and we check on them if they’re too quiet.
We childproof our homes, rounding out the hard edges.
When they learn to walk we hunch ourselves over for months to protect them from corners.
We teach our children values.
We teach them to pray.
We get to know their friends because we don’t want any bad influences affecting them.
We worry.
We work with them on their homework every day and night.
We endure their terrible teenage moods.
We drive them back to school when they forgot a book.
We stay up with them finisihing projects that are due tomorrow.
We bring them to Mass on Sundays and holy days.
We work hard for decades in order to educate our precious children.
And then we pay $25,000 a year to send them to be educated by people who teach them to hate everything we taught them, tear down our values, and despise our patriarchal religious zealotry. And then we wonder what happened. Stop the madness.
February 28, 2013 at 6:03 pm
So what is your solution?
I hope it is not some form of anti-intellectualism.
February 28, 2013 at 6:04 pm
YES!
My siblings either went to Franciscan or Ave Maria- I was the only one to go to a secular university (I was unwilling to pay the loans needed)- BUT I lived at home…worked a lot, cantored the 7 Am Mass before joining the rest of the family for the 9, etc, etc- there are no guarantees, but we are all married in the Church and baptizing our kids
February 28, 2013 at 6:57 pm
We paid 22K for a year @ a local Catholic college. After the first semester showed it's fruits we had our child relocated to the local city college @ 1100 a semester. If we are gonna pay for nonsense, we might as well get what we pay for.
February 28, 2013 at 7:06 pm
$25K/yr. sounds like a Jesuit prep school. I live close to Georgetown Prep in Rockville, MD. I did even bother applying considering their Liberal approach. They do more damage than public schools sad to say.
February 28, 2013 at 7:07 pm
elm @ 1:57 PM
Touché!
February 28, 2013 at 7:13 pm
Actually, you spend $25,000 to send them to be taught by people who would have preferred that your children be cut into pieces and sucked into a sink.
February 28, 2013 at 7:45 pm
The anti-intellectualism of American colleges and universities has become their defining feature. On the one hand, you have a variety of glorified trade schools – business, the sciences, engineering and the like – where external realities like balancing accounts and having your buildings not collapse act as a check on the worst nihilistic and relativistic fantasies. On the other hand, you have education and philosophy and women's studies and the like where the entire concept of objective reality is explicitly rejected – that's just the oppressive male hierarchy talking, don't you know.
So, the two worlds – high-end VoTech and the post-Hegelian mental self-abuse – ignore each other, for the most part. Either way, your kids and mine are unlikely to get any 'intellectual' education at most colleges.
Thank God for places like Thomas Aquinas College, Franciscan at Stubenville and the like.
February 28, 2013 at 8:43 pm
As a professor at a science and tech university it is nice to miss out on much of the liberal arts nonsense at the state schools. But it's gradually creeping in. When I started at college, I remember one sociology prof saying that if you wanted to see social stigma in action to wear a bright red dress, lipstick, etc….for a man and see the looks and comments you get. 20yrs later, I suspect you wouldn't get many looks. Now, I figure if you walk through campus praying the rosary you would get more social stigma hurled at you.
February 28, 2013 at 8:57 pm
Not me, pal.
I am a Viet-Nam veteran and a convert, worked my way through a Catholic university that, in the event, wasn't all that Catholic, and taught lessons on St. Thomas Becket and St. Thomas More that fitted quite nicely into the Texas public-school curriculum. And I wasn't the only one — a great many good Methodist and Baptist teachers did good work too.
February 28, 2013 at 11:37 pm
Amen
Amen
Amen
March 1, 2013 at 1:04 am
My kids went to our state university and spent a good deal of time at the Catholic Center. My daughter met her husband at the Catholic Center (he had only reverted recently – baptized Catholic, but raised Protestant). They're all solid faithful Catholics and so are there friends who hung out there. One of the things about being at a secular college is that the true Christians hang together, they don't make fun of each other for being too religious or too pietistic. We have friends whose kids went to various sorts of Christian colleges (both Catholic and Protestant) whose faith waned (or disappeared entirely) while they were there (it even happened at Steubenville). I wouldn't trash good Catholic colleges, but I would say that negative peer pressure can happen even at good schools and positive peer influence can happen at schools where you would think nothing positive could ever happen. One good thing about our kids going to the state university was that they were able to graduate debt free and consequently we now have grandchildren with a stay at home mom. If they'd been paying off private college bills they wouldn't be able to afford that. I'm truly thankful for the campus ministry that is there.
March 1, 2013 at 2:22 am
The faculty the sate university where I teach are certainly dominated by liberal atheists, but there are some good Catholics out there. We have to fight against the text books we use, the graduate students who want to out us, and the administrators. When a colleague told his students that religious support is not valid for a good argument, I said to his student, "So he's just wiping out thousands of years of human thought."
At some point God will answer our prayers and allow true freedom of thought on college campuses.