Mary we crown thee with blossoms today! - (Roger Ebert praises his Catholic school education)

Chicago Sun-Times ^ | August 4, 2010 | Roger Ebert

[re_tail20]

My grade school couldn't get state approval today. The teachers were unpaid and lived communally. Two grades were taught in one classroom. There were no resources for science, music, physical education, or foreign languages except the Latin of the Mass and hymns. No playground facilities. The younger students were picked up by the single school bus; as soon as we were old enough, we rode our bikes to school, even in winter.

A typical meal in the lunchroom might consist of a peanut butter and jelly sandwich on white bread, a dish of corn, a dish of fruit cocktail, and a carton of milk. On Fridays we had fish sticks or macaroni and cheese. On bad days we got chipped beef on toast, and that's how I discovered that word. If you had a penny, you might buy a jawbreaker afterward.

I received a first-rate education. At St. Mary's Grade School in Champaign, one block across Wright street from Urbana, were we taught by Dominican nuns who knew their subjects cold, gave us their full-time attention, were gifted teachers and commanded order and respect in the classroom. For eight years we were drilled on reading, writing, arithmetic, and religion. Periods were devoted to history, geography and science, taught from textbooks without visual aids or any other facilities. We learned how to write well, spell, and god knows we learned how to diagram a sentence. And we looped away at the Palmer Handwriting Method, neatly writing JMJ at the top of every page, for Jesus, Mary and Joseph, who would bless our lessons, but not always.

[sinanju]

It’s a great read, I’ll give him that.

He learned a lot, even though the school was impoverished and had zero facilities and the nuns were not sadists.

So what’s his opinion on school vouchers?

[smokingfrog]

Even a broken clock...

[Mrs. Don-o]

His memory is are a little bit erratic (the Feast of the Assumption is August 15, not May 1; the Church does not teach the damnation of Jews and Protestants, no matter what he thought he heard!) --- but I think this little memoir was probably written in good will.

The young nuns --- yes, some of our teachers were so new in their religious habits, fresh our of high school. Fun, and pretty too: we were in love with them. The lunchroom description caused a pang of recognition. It's true! If we had Campbell's Tomato Soup, it counted as a hot meal!

[raybbr]

We learned how to write well, spell, and god knows we learned how to diagram a sentence.

I guess they forgot to teach him to capitalize God...

[re_tail20]

One interesting excerpt:

“I can’t prove that a St. Mary’s graduate had a better education than a majority of today’s high school graduates, but that’s my impression. Some of the high school kids who write good comments on my blog say they’ve taken over their own education, at least in reading and writing. At some point they wanted to because their classes had become boring. I taught rhetoric in a Chicago city college for a year. The impression I got was that some students always could write, and some of the others would never be able to. For years during grade and high school I read secretly at my desk, while following the class elsewhere in my mind.”

[RJR_fan]

When I encounter that pompous affectation in a library book, I redline it, and add a page-filling upper-case G to ram home the point. Only fools treat the most important Noun in the universe with belittling contempt.