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.