Are Catholic Schools more Lax on discipline

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Okay, I don’t know where to put this, but since it deals with schools, I thought family life would be the place to put it.

Anyway, Are catholic schools more lax at discipline. The reason I ask is that when I was in high school, a girl I was friends with and interested in dating went to a public school in another town and was from a very devout Catholic family. She felt that Catholic Schools were more lenient than a public school on discipline. While a lot of it is her opinion, It makes me wonder if its true.

Not to give my whole life story, but after being bullied for being gay (it was done more because i had a temper and I hated being called gay, I think they knew I wasn’t) I handled it bad and threatened a kid because I just got so mad and wanted it to stop. Anyway I got suspended for 2 days (rightfully), while the perpetrators did not get punished. However I’ve heard of similar situations at public schools where kids who made threats and got suspended for a semester or kicked out. However (thank god) my sentence was light.

So are public schools easier on discipline? Is it because of the whole Christian idea of mercy (not that its a bad thing). I sometimes feel like while kids are better behaved in Catholic schools, when bad things happen they don’t get punished very severely (and maybe they shouldn’t. I don’t know about any other situations than my own.
 
About as silly as trying to make a generalized statement about “black people.”

In either case, the answer is that it totally depends on the individual in question.
 
There must be huge variations between different schools. I would, however, feel safe in guessing that there is much less crime and violence per capita in Catholic schools than in public schools.
 
WildCatholic said:
Okay, I don’t know where to put this, but since it deals with schools, I thought family life would be the place to put it.

Anyway, Are catholic schools more lax at discipline. The reason I ask is that when I was in high school, a girl I was friends with and interested in dating went to a public school in another town and was from a very devout Catholic family. She felt that Catholic Schools were more lenient than a public school on discipline. While a lot of it is her opinion, It makes me wonder if its true.

Not to give my whole life story, but after being bullied for being gay (it was done more because i had a temper and I hated being called gay, I think they knew I wasn’t) I handled it bad and threatened a kid because I just got so mad and wanted it to stop. Anyway I got suspended for 2 days (rightfully), while the perpetrators did not get punished. However I’ve heard of similar situations at public schools where kids who made threats and got suspended for a semester or kicked out. However (thank god) my sentence was light.

So are public schools easier on discipline? Is it because of the whole Christian idea of mercy (not that its a bad thing). I sometimes feel like while kids are better behaved in Catholic schools, when bad things happen they don’t get punished very severely (and maybe they shouldn’t. I don’t know about any other situations than my own.
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Uhmm, you shouldn’t base this on one kids opinion which could be clouded by the fact that she didn’t go to a Catholic School. I have 2 boys who have attended Catholic Schools all the way into HS (one a senior and then one a sophomore) and I can safely say that Catholic Schools are much more orderly and stronger in discipline. In fact, sometimes in the elementary, it seemed like the school would over react to some situations or had an uneven discipline (some kids got in trouble and some got a pass). Orderliness has been one of the hallmarks of Catholic education.
 
There is simply no way to take one individual’s personal opinion based on her experience and extrapolate it out as indicative of some larger trend amongst all Catholic and public schools. That would be like me saying that, because the guy who cut me off in traffic was driving a blue car, I’m going to assume that all drivers of blue cars are more wreckless than drivers of green cars. It does not follow.

Different schools in different areas are all over the board when it comes to discipline. If anything, my experience is the opposite – the Catholic schools I went to were much more disciplined. But that’s just my experience.
 
I think it is too general of a statement. I think it is very individual, depends on the school, depends on the faculty.
 
My dad went to Catholic schools throughout, and said that there were no behavior issues, because if you acted out, you were kicked out.

It might be a little less strict now because there are fewer students attending, but severely disruptive students can still be expelled much more easily than at a public school.
 
In my experience, the discipline has been better at private schools whether or not the punishments were more or less severe, and this was in both Catholic and secular private schools. Different schools have different situations, but private schools have the club of being able to screen who they take in the first place and to expel a student who is unmanageable. There is a political side to this, however, because expelling the child of a family prominent in the parish or who is a big contributor to the private school (and perhaps active on the school board) is of course makes expulsion for the same offenses more difficult to accomplish.

Still, some Catholic schools have administrators with a “kids will be kids, let 'em play the game” attitude. Most of the bullies, since they are also the kind that test boundaries to see what they can get away with and for how many times before suffering consequences, catch on to any system very quickly, and the vulnerable ones suffer when that is the case. Other bullies, the ones with more anger they want to take out and less care about what they have to pay in order to pay it out, are going to assault somebody no matter what the rules are. That is when expulsion becomes necessary to protect the innocent.
 
I only went to two Catholic schools (pre-K through 8th, then 9th through 12) but both were the same. Among many other examples I have, I once got suspended for laughing at a picture of a snail. Later in the same year, the same teacher overheard me threaten a kid with a knife, in gory detail in a heated argument, and nothing was done, my bookbag wasn’t searched, etc. My experience has been that discipline and order are enforced in some schools and shrugged off in others. I believe that my schools shrugged them off because in the Catholic community I grew up in, we don’t address elephants in the room and rather sweep them under the rug because if you don’t talk about the difficult stuff, that means it doesn’t exist.
 
I have heard many teachers who taught at Catholic schools say that they took a pay cut to do it, because although the public schools paid better, they didn’t allow the teachers to enforce discipline. The teachers at the public school next door that I talked to about it voiced the same opinion, because they did not appreciate getting to deal with the “problem children” who got expelled from the Catholic high school.
 
Joe_5859 said:
Different schools in different areas are all over the board when it comes to discipline. If anything, my experience is the opposite – the Catholic schools I went to were much more disciplined. But that’s just my experience.
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Exactly. And my experience is just the opposite of Joe’s…the Catholic schools I went to and/or are familiar were much less disciplined than the public high school I went to. The reality is that there is no way to answer that question. It amazes me that so many people still carry the attitude of, “I would never send my kids to a Catholic/public because of _______” In my opinion, I think it is incredibly important to examine the individual school not just look at whether it is Catholic or public. :confused:
 
llenadegracia said:
It amazes me that so many people still carry the attitude of, “I would never send my kids to a Catholic/public because of _______” In my opinion, I think it is incredibly important to examine the individual school not just look at whether it is Catholic or public. :confused:
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