This is a chicken-and-egg problem. But mediocre academics at Catholic schools are an essential element of this vicious cycle.
I challenge you to go to google and search for, “Do Catholic schools outperform public schools.”
STOP posting lies. Look at the facts. Catholic schools (in general) well outperform their public school counterparts…it is a known fact, not a guess. So, please, stop with the constant lies…do some research.
I don’t know a single parent who chose to send their kids to a non-Catholic private school because they require parents to buy laptops for their kids or because they have the best sports facilities. I know plenty of parents who have brushed aside my suggestion of Catholic schools because there are better private altnernatives. I would be very surprised if my experience was unique.
You are going off on another excellence=snobishness tangent. Is there some fear of knowledge or success here? Are children with a mediocre education holier?
I’m glad your school is succeeding. Academic excellence may not be “the main marketing hook” but it is an essential critieria. The whole faith includes the essential elements of secular success. That, in turn, leads to parents who can afford to have many children and pay for their Catholic education and maybe even to help others too. That is what’s called a virtuous cycle.
The parents of today’s school-age Catholic children are the former students of Catholic schools.
I don’t have an immediate answer but it’s a shame it’s turning/turned out like this, especially since the Church made such powerful strides since the mid-19th-century when Catholicism had practically been non-existent in the U.S. It’s debatable when this tide turned from building to closing and there were many reasons for it. To say only contraception caused it is oversimplification. One can then ask what caused people to contracept in the first place.
The vast majority are not–that is part of the problem. The baby boom generation is to blame here. They walked away from the faith beginning in the late 60s and extending out from there…they handed their apostasizing mess down to their children, and those children grew-up and became parents and it all became worse. That is the horrible mess we are in right now, forty plus years of apostasy has lead us to this place.
I agree…the reasons are many. However, the solution is clear–Jesus. We need more Jesus, not less.
Nonsense. The elite private schools that cost $15k-20k / student aren’t spending that cash on better books. It largely goes to the sort of frills I mentioned. Go look at some. The high price isn’t the cost of academic excellence, it is the barrier to keep out the “riffraff.” By setting the tuition sky high, they weed out many of the parents that don’t really care about their kid’s education all that much.
Indeed–Catholic parents who take their personal vocation as their number one task in life, as a sign of their love their love for God.
The question to ask is how do they define “better”? It’s easy to say that the Catholic schools are watered down or aren’t very Catholic. But can these parents say with a straight face that a non-Catholic private school is “better” at providing a Catholic education for their children? Remember providing a Catholic education is **required **of Catholic parents. That doesn’t necessarily mean Catholic schools but it is still a requirement to provide a Catholic education. (and 50 minutes a week of CCE isn’t going to pass muster.)
I’m a Catholic, and I send my kids to public school. My children are very intelligent, the public school has much better education, and I’m not going to sacrifice their future for the sake of sending them to a school with Catholic stamped on it. Sorry, not going to happen, and many other Catholic parents agree.
Just do the math. If Catholic schools had done their job then those students would have grown up, had big Cathlic familes, and would now be sending their children to Catholic schools. Catholic schools would at least be growing with the increase in the population of Catholic school attending Catholics regardless of what other Catholics are doing.
If I were to enlarge the problem to the Church in general I would look at the failure of Vatican II. The goal of Vatican II to successfully resolve “relations between the Roman Catholic Church and the modern world” (mainly secularism but increasingly paganism). But let’s stick to the more focused topic here.
If the choice were between good academics and good Catholic education this might be a hard choice. But if Catholic schools are not good at either then parents might as well send their children to good academic schools and take on the challenge of religious education themselves.
I have. Far and away the biggest cost is teacher salaries.
This is certainly a consequence of the higher price but this is also true of Catholic schools. If a school charges any tuition it will not be the choice of parents who don’t make education a priority because they can always send their children to public schools for free.
The choices that parents make about instilling diligence and discipline are very complicated and I’ve certainly seen plenty of over-indulgent wealthy parents. But what I’ve noticed is that, today, Catholics are only marginally better than secularists but they pale in comparison to immigrant Asians (including Indo-Asians).
You are just flat wrong about Catholic schools (in a general sense). They typically outperform public schools by a very significant margin. Perhaps the public school your kids attend is different than most public schools, yet in general public schools cannot touch the academic performance of most Catholic schools.
While academics is important, it pales in comparison to God and Heaven. It is important that all Catholics remember that.Again, stop lying about Catholic schools. In studies, it is found that Catholic students score higher on Sat’s and on their ACT’s, than do public school students…again, not a guess, these are facts.
Why do you insist on accusing me of comparing Catholic schools unfavorably to public schools? I have nowhere made that comparison. I am comparing it to other tuition schools, i.e. non-Catholic private schools.
As I noted above that is a useless and misleading measure of performance.
No, it proves my point–that Catholic parents have apostasized. The Church is to bear some blame too, no doubt…yet the majority falls on Catholic parents who snubbed their noses at Church teachings despite the Church making those teachings clear. Every Catholic is bound to know and follow the full faith, no matter what any other person is doing. The Catholic parents who have apostasized did so intentionally, they knew the faith, they rejected the faith, and they handed that down to their kids. The parents became social Catholics, and they “stuffed” their kids in Catholic schools to make themselves feel good–yet they did not get involved, they did not bring their kids to Mass, they did not teach their kids the faith, they did not go to Confession, etc…that has lead to this mess.