Back To School

Three weeks from today most kids will be back in school [lucky, lucky]. Earlier today I heard a report on the radio ranking the different schools in Toronto - elementary and high schools, not the universities and colleges. The main thing to come out of the report was that, in general, the Catholic schools came out on top of the public schools. Huh. This seems to be a popular line of thinking, if anecdotal evidence means anything - when Joseph's family moved to Oakville, they were told that the Catholic schools would be a better choice for their two children still in school. I also went to Catholic school for fifteen years of my life [my dad's family was/is Catholic] - but I'm sure that was due to religion, not because anyone felt that it was a higher quality. I go back and forth trying to decide if this was the right choice for me.

First off, I am the first to defend my Catholic school - particularly the high school experience. I am not Catholic and kinda struggled with religion as an adolescent - so going through the whole forced religious experience really shaped me. It made me fiesty and unafraid to say unpopular things. When it was time to go to high school my parents told me I could choose between the public school and the Catholic school. However, I was thirteen years old and every single one of my earthly friends were going to the Catholic school so...it wasn't really much of a choice. Being in a new place, surrounded by strangers was not something that 13-year-old me, in all my awkward glory, wanted to do [for the record, it's not something that 30-year-old me is keen on either]. So off I went to the land of one religion class per year and dress codes and definitely no fun sex ed. class with condoms on bananas.

And really, it was mostly okay. I'm not a big defender of Catholicism in general because I think it has a lot to answer for - but my school was pretty okay. My main complaint after I had graduated was that my school was really intense with math and science. Which, of course, is a noble pursuit...but not for artsy-fartsy me. I was jealous of the public school which had multiple English and history classes and even science without the maths! Not everyone can excel @ math and science and people who are more humanities smart are just as intelligent as the math geeks [in our school I always felt like I was being treated as not quite as brilliant as English and other arts were seen as easier subjects]. And yes, each year we had to take a mandatory religion class. For the first two years, this was a class mostly about the Catholic religion - which, while sometimes dull, was still a valuable education [especially for me - I knew so much about religion/history/imagery that studying fine art was dead easy]. I'm very interested in religion, so it was okay. In the last three years we took standard sociology type classes with a religious bent. Again, I don't feel as though we were cheated out of learning - in these classes we wrote critical essays, had regular exams, learned research techniques - all stuff that I went on to use in university.

You could say that I've had a wonderful reconciliation with my past life as a Catholic schoolgirl. Ha. I like puns.