I’m still shocked when I remember this: with church services in progress, children hung out of the windows of a Catholic school classroom and hurled insults at everyone who passed by. And also at me.
It wasn’t the only time they did this, either. Obviously there was no adult supervision on hand (he said in a burst of optimism).
We’re gonna wind up in Lord of the Flies if we don’t get our act back together.
As I settled down outside to write this morning, I was disturbed by bad music that was getting louder and louder. It seemed to be coming from just around the far corner of our building: heavy metal, with a lot of shrieking f-bombs and other profanities.
So I got up to go and put a stop to it, and as I walked toward the sidewalk, a child appeared in a window of the Catholic school across the street and quickly pulled it down–shutting off the music.
It wasn’t some yobbo in the street. It was kids in a Catholic school classroom, getting up to mischief because their teacher, I presume, wasn’t there to stop them.
The lesson here is simple: sending your kids to a Christian school does not remove them from our polluted culture. They’ll just bring it with them. I expected better from children in a Catholic school, having taught in one myself, but obviously I was wrong. What they hear on the outside, they bring inside the school.
I used to trust the kids in my Catholic school classroom if I had to step outside for a few minutes, and they never disappointed me.
But that was quite a few years ago, and our culture has not gotten better in the interim.