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Blog: FCAR
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Faith-based schooling: A mixed
blessing?
By Marion Brady
*October 15, 2001
I grew up taking traditional, sectarian, faith-based schools for granted. To the
extent that I thought about them (which wasn’t much) I felt they had a job to do
and were doing it rather well. A passing comment in a brief conversation has
left me less certain about my feelings.
About eight o’clock on the morning of September 12th I was seven time zones east
of Orlando, sitting on the balcony of an apartment in the village of Naoussa, on
the island of Paros in the Aegean Sea.
I was watching CNN. On the television screen, a floodlit mass of twisted steel
and broken concrete was barely visible through smoke. Beyond my balcony’s
railing, the bluest-imaginable water, flashing in sunlight, stretched to the
horizon.
On the television screen, the jaws of a piece of heavy equipment clamped on a
beam and lifted it in a cloud of dust. Just below my balcony, an elderly
fisherman sat on a rock in knee-deep water and, using another rock as a table,
filleted a fish.
On television, a film clip ran repeatedly, showing an airliner punching into the
World Trade Center’s south tower. Just off to my left, a dozen fishing boats,
moored gunwale to gunwale, pulled gently at their lines. On the nearest one,
what looked to be a father and his teen-aged daughter and son sat cross-legged
in the shade of a canvas canopy mending a bright yellow fishing net.
On the screen, a succession of talking heads expressed outrage and demanded that
justice be done. From the street in front of my apartment, children talked,
laughed, called to each other on their way to school.
On the screen, a well-known writer of novels of military intrigue and adventure
saw the horrific event as a military failure. The CIA, he said, was inadequately
funded and leaned too heavily on technology rather than agents and informers. I,
an educator, saw the event, finally, as a failure of education and recalled
again H.G. Wells’ observation that human history is a race between education and
catastrophe. Ignorance makes it easy for enemies to demonize each other. When
that happens, reasonableness is out of the question. The righteous don’t bargain
with evil.
Looking for escape, turned off the television, made myself presentable, and
headed up the hill to Naoussa’s elementary school.
It was the second day of classes. In an inner courtyard, parents were helping
teachers sort out neat, well-scrubbed children and get them in double lines.
Nothing in the appearance or actions of the children would have kept them from
fitting perfectly into any middle class American elementary school.
I found the office and the headmaster. It was a busy day, so I asked only for
permission to wander around and observe classes. This I did, picking up random
information from two or three young teachers who spoke English.
The school had 240 students aged six to twelve. "Seventy are Albanians," one of
the teachers volunteered. This was a problem, she said, but a problem of short
duration, for the young children picked up Greek very quickly.
The average class size was 20. The school had two administrators—a headmaster
and a vice-headmaster. The headmaster taught a little; the vice-headmaster
carried a full teaching load.
A few minutes after nine o’clock classes were all in place. Language aside, the
school felt like many others here in America and in other parts of the world.
Back at my apartment, the thing that stuck in my mind was the passing comment,
"Seventy are Albanians." It started the chain of thought that led me to begin to
wonder about faith-based schools—schools run by religious orders and
denominations.
Like most everyone else, I’ve always been impressed by the relative smoothness
with which most such schools function. But now, I wonder about the possible
tradeoff. If, instead of Naoussa’s elementary school, there had been two
schools—a Greek Orthodox school and a Muslim school—if in Northern Ireland there
were no sectarian, only public schools—might not those arrangements shape
different futures?
Certainly schooling with a spiritual dimension has much to commend it. I’m
certain that two of my grandchildren profited from it. But does it have a cost?
*Originally published in the Orlando Sentinel. Published here by
permission of the author.
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