{"id":1749,"date":"2009-03-17T10:35:23","date_gmt":"2009-03-17T18:35:23","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/secularright.org\/wordpress\/?p=1749"},"modified":"2009-03-17T10:35:23","modified_gmt":"2009-03-17T18:35:23","slug":"book-learnin","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/book-learnin\/","title":{"rendered":"Book Learnin’"},"content":{"rendered":"

By way of celebrating St. Patrick’s Day, I reviewed Kevin Myers’ memoir of the Northern Ireland troubles,\u00a0Watching\u00a0the Door<\/em><\/a>, for Taki’s Magazine. (Review not yet posted.)<\/p>\n

I noticed the following curiosity on p.159, though I didn’t include it in my review.<\/p>\n

Within the Protestant folklore [i.e. of working-class Northern Ireland] Catholics were immigrants from backward, southern\u00a0Ireland\u00a0\u2026 \u00a0into Protestant Ulster. Catholics didn’t keep their word, and were lazy and ignorant; and indeed there were elements of truth\u00a0in the broadstroke mythologies.<\/p>\n

For there was a dysfunctional quality to Catholic education. Catholic schools did not teach engineering, metalwork, or mechanical\u00a0drawing\u00a0\u2014 and this in an economy which had been traditionally based on engineering. So, if a business was looking for a fifteen-year-old\u00a0apprentice, which would it choose\u00a0\u2014 the little Catholic lad with his Latin, or the Protestant boy with an entire array of technical\u00a0skills?<\/p>\n

To be sure, there was little enough evidence that engineering firms were thirsting to give jobs to Catholics: but the Catholic educational system\u00a0actually made discrimination against Catholics wiser to implement. For Catholic schools had their eyes on the professions: low achievement for the\u00a0unscholarly was a pathological norm within Catholic working-class society. One can loathe [Provisional IRA terrorist commanders] Martin McGuiness\u00a0and Gerry Adams and their deeds, yet at the same time recognize that they are men of extraordinary intelligence and talent. Both left school without\u00a0a single qualification, McGuinness to become an apprentice butcher, Adams to become a barman.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

This prompted a number of thoughts. There is, for example, the broad educational issue probed in Charles Murray’s recent book\u00a0Real\u00a0Education<\/em><\/a>, about the overly academic emphasis of current U.S. public education, with its implicit assumption that every student is headed\u00a0for law school\u00a0\u2014 what Steve Sailer calls the “Yale or jail” approach. My son’s school has no shop classes. \u00a0This seems to be the same educational problem Myers is talking about.<\/p>\n

Then I got to wondering if this a true thing about Catholic education in general. I have no clue, but perhaps readers with an experience of\u00a0parochial education in the U.S. might offer opinions. It does seem to be broadly true, in my experience anyway, that there’s a sort of nit-picking\u00a0argumentativeness that you find much more in well-educated Catholics than in others. Do Catholic educators spend so much time hammering grand\u00a0metaphysical schemas into their students’ heads\u00a0\u2014 the blessed Aristotle, the sainted Aquinas, and the rest\u00a0\u2014 and training them\u00a0in arguments they can use to confound heretics and unbelievers, they have no time for anything practical? It fits with the general high quality of\u00a0Catholic intellectuals (assuming you like intellectuals\u00a0\u2026), but I’m really just curious to hear opinions.<\/p>\n

Kevin Myers is himself Irish-Catholic, by the way, though he was raised in England.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

By way of celebrating St. Patrick’s Day, I reviewed Kevin Myers’ memoir of the Northern Ireland troubles,\u00a0Watching\u00a0the Door, for Taki’s Magazine. (Review not yet posted.) I noticed the following curiosity on p.159, though I didn’t include it in my review. … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_mi_skip_tracking":false},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1749"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1749"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1749\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1752,"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1749\/revisions\/1752"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1749"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1749"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1749"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}