book review

I just finished reading Sisters, Catholic Nuns and the Making of America that I checked out from the local library. It was a fascinating book, full of stories of wild west adventures, the first female American CEOs, the rapid expansion of private schools and hospitals, and the collapse of female religious after Vatican II. Did you know that of the 4 American Saints, 3 are nuns?

The most useful portion of the book for me was the findings of a 1982 study by 3 sociologists that showed, "students from widely differing economic backgrounds and from parents with different levels of education performed better, as a group, in Catholic schools." They found that the achievement gap between races was narrower than in public schools. The four reasons given for their high level of achievement were the higher level of discipline, that parochial school teachers had a base of moral authority, that all important decisions were made at individual schools, and (very important) the "steadfast resistance" to educational fads.

Of course the days of squadrons of nuns in habits teaching classes of 60 1st graders with complete control are long over. Most parochial schools are at the most staffed by 1-2 nuns with lay people, sometimes not even Catholic, teaching children watered-down curriculum. But many Catholic homeschoolers embrace all 4 of these principals. I wonder what studies will find in decades to come, perhaps we will be reading lines like, "90% of religious vocations coming from the homeschooling movement?"