A firm educational hand?
How do you get children in a deprived area beset with drugs and gang violence to college? Cristo Rey, a private school in Chicago founded by Jesuits, seems to have found an answer. All students commit to going to college, follow a strict dress code, punctiality is enforced, drug users and gang members/sympathisers kicked out and in return they get an intensive high school education, safe environment and personal and family support. The cost is $10,000 a year. However, the impoverished families don’t pay the fees, the pupils spend five days a month temping in the major offices and businesses in the city earning their fees and picking up a variety of skills.
Sounds like a good idea, except the compulsory indoctrination to receive your hand up.
A Cristo Rey model school shall meet the following standards. The school:
1. Is explicitly Catholic in mission and enjoys Church approval.
Even worse, Na, all that compulsory indoctrination in reading, writing and ‘rithmetic. Not to mention lessons in responsibility, self-esteem and civic responsibility. Jesus H. Christ! maybe even philosophy!
If we don’t stop these Jesuits in their tracks who knows where the next generation of hopeless young souls to train as the crack consumers of capitalism might come from? Damn me, the market might collapse and that could hardly be good for christian values now could it?