I could tell immediately it was going to be a long couple of hours. I was sitting, as everyone was supposed to be, but many others were not. They were simply ignoring the people in uniform telling them to obey the rules. They kept saying, over and over, that it was time to sit down. They were practically pleading: Please.
Yes, I was on an airplane.
I don’t want to make too much of this because there were no truly dangerous incidents during the flight, just a lot of people ignoring normal standards of behavior, and a few simply being rude to the flight attendants. At one point, a frustrated attendant told a passenger, “Stop wagging your finger in my face.”
The cramped seat without enough leg room, the boredom of flying, and especially the less-than-adult behavior of some passengers – I felt like I was in school again.
My high school class graduated in the era characterized by Vietnam and Woodstock. At our best, we were enthusiastic and idealistic, fun-loving and adventurous. At our worst, we were demanding, self-righteous and rebellious for the sake of being rebellious.
Teenagers are expected to be insufferable occasionally, and expected to grow out of it. But sometimes I feel American society is growing into the negative traits of my graduating class. It’s the coarseness of popular entertainment. It’s the tribalism (which seems like expanded teenage cliquishness). It’s the aggressiveness, the attention-seeking and self-absorption.
Each period of time has its own challenges. One of our challenges is living in a culture overwhelmed with the incessant voices of “influencers,” anything-goes podcasters, manipulative cable news hosts, social media bullies, vulgar comedians and all kinds of people I’m too old to know about.
And so, I believe Catholic schools may be more needed than ever.
In his book “The Conservative Sensibility,” George Will, an atheist but not hostile to religion, states that the Christian conception of humanity “is just about right for political philosophy.”
“Man can be magnificent,” he writes, “but he is magnificent rarely, and never spontaneously – never without help from nurturing institutions.”
What else is a school but a nurturing institution? It’s the place where young people spend long periods of time learning academics from responsible adults. Ideally, they also learn about common decency, patience, tolerance and fairness. Virtues like these are not really “taught”; they have to be modeled and imitated.
This is true of public as well as Catholic schools, and I’m not writing to criticize public schools. I’m a product of the public system and can speak well of the schools I attended.
Catholic schools operate under severe hardships and, to be clear, those hardships need to be alleviated some. Even so, they reflect a source of strength.
All adults, both educators and parents, make sacrifices to be part of a Catholic school community. Students are taught by professionals who agree to work for lower salaries than they could make elsewhere. Moreover, young people are always influenced by their peers. Every student in a Catholic school is surrounded by other students whose own families also have made significant sacrifices to give them a Catholic school education.
This mutually fortifying teacher/parent/student triangle of care and expectations does not turn a classroom into an educational paradise, but it does encourage a disciplined and rewarding learning environment.
A friend of mine who was educated in Catholic schools became a Catholic school teacher himself. He taught high school science for 40 years.
During the 15 years I knew him, he never complained about his students, but he often talked about them. In his telling, every one of them had unique talents, or enviable potential or admirable qualities. It wasn’t that he was incapable of seeing faults in people. (We talked politics a lot.) He just liked his job and took it seriously, and he understood kids as well as he understood the subjects he taught.
He just died, and many former students have come forward to express their deep gratitude for how he influenced their lives.
So, not long ago I began a vacation with a resigned sigh because I was surrounded by adults behaving like overprivileged adolescents. Almost as soon as I returned to New Jersey, I had a funeral to attend.
But, knowing my friend as I did and hearing from his former students, I felt a renewed optimism about how much and how well people can learn.
Carl Peters is former managing editor of the Catholic Star Herald.
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