My Education

Recently, I have been most interested in the attention focused on Brockton High School, the one I enjoyed. "60 Minutes" lauded the recent achievements in the urban school that is very large and diverse. Students from multiple ethnic backgrounds and languages have languished in an academic environment that has been despicable. The recent turn-around has been a result of a successful approach by all teachers to require writing in each class. While sounding rather rudimentary, the results have been notable.

When I first learned about this change in the fortune of my high school (the actual building no longer exists), I thought back with a favorable opinion of my education. I saw the trend in education in Brockton as similar to the entire city, i.e., dramatically downward.

However, I recently visited a former classmate who has a serious medical disorder. We were talking about the good press that Brockton received recently. When I commented favorably about our own high school education, she shared her experience in college when she discovered that she had never done a term paper. And, she was a real good student who studied, in contrast to my focus on sports!

But, I then recalled my early experience in the seminary. I was disturbed to find out how ignorant I was compared to those students who graduated from Boston Latin and BC High. While I then attributed my ignorance to my lack of academic discipline, my classmate's story suggests that maybe I was not provided as good an education as I thought. Maybe, my ignorance was only partially explained by my interest in sports (an interest that actually saved me psychologically from all the disturbances at home). A greater part of the story is that I came from a relatively poor educational system.

With the current discussions on how education can be improved, I am aware that I came from a culture without an interest in education. My mother was denied an education in Ireland and my father was not a high school graduate. No one talked about "issues", far less set goals or expectations about my future. No one listened to news on the radio.

My personal experience of finding out how "ignorant" I was compared to some of my contemporaries ignited a life-long push to insure that I would continually overcome any ignorance, including ignorance resulting from bias and poor information. I recall telling a bishop who was chastising me about the content of my sermons that my initial seminary education virtually caused me to commit intellectual suicide (by teaching what proved to be horrendous distortions of theology) and I would ensure that I would share only the best of what was available to parishioners. In order to get the best of what was available, it was clear to me that I had to keep learning because everything was subject to revision based on new knowledge.

Given the meager introduction to knowledge, I am at least ending my life feeling that I did my best to remedy by my younger years.