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>>>A lot of my best friends as a kid went to Catholic schools. Their school stories were an awakening for me because somehow I had an image of nuns as sweet old ladies. Not hardly. They knocked the snot out of students and if you said anything you got it twice as hard. There did not seem to be any correlation between abstinence and kindness.
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>>Actually, maybe there is. I think abstinence makes them *mean* . <bg>
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>You know what they say. You can look at a nun, just don't get in the habit.
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>My daughters went to a Catholic school in Chicago for 9 years and 6 years, respectively. No nuns, all lay faculty, although some of them were not exactly sweetness and light. My ex wife was raised Catholic and thought it would be good for them. Considering the state of Chicago public schools (other than some sensational magnet schools) she was right.

My sister's kids also did elementary school in Catholic school and they were very good schools. One of my clients was a Catholic girls' HS here and I was very impressed with that place. Just having a school where behavior matters is about 90% of the game.

In the 50s behavior mattered in suburban public schools (and the homes of the students) so the kind of corporal punishment common in Catholic schools seemed pretty unnecessary. But of course to the WASPs in our circle it all just seemed an extension of the Inquisition <g>