Kids in religious schools more sheltered?

In My Humble Opinion
1

Some time ago, a niece of mine was in 1st grade and a boy in her class said he was going to kiss her.

She wasn’t horrified. Her parents were, though (maybe because she wasn’t?) and there was some talk at that point about maybe moving toward homeschooling since even the Catholic school wasn’t “safe” and “sheltered” enough.

I didn’t go to Catholic school until university, but I never had the impression it was a more sheltered environment. Is it? Would any religious school be exempt from a 6-year-old boy wanting to kiss a girl in the schoolyard, or anything similar?

I’d be interested in your experiences as a child, a parent, or just an observer, not just about kissing but about anything parents find nervewracking that their children can be exposed to.

2

I attended fundamental Christian schools from 1st to 5th grade. We were extremely sheltered and going to public school for the first time in grade 6 was almost a culture shock.

3

I was pretty sheltered even going to a non-religious private school for a little while. (My mom worked there, so she got me in cheap.) I wish I could describe the difference going to a public school later. The discipline problems were worse by a factor of ten. A boy kissing a girl was probably the worst thing that happened there. I didn’t even know people got into fights, knew nothing about bullies. And the biggest punishment ever used was having to stay inside during recess (and that was usually to finish your work.)

Sorry, I’m rambling a bit. But I’ve offered something.

4

On the high school level, kids coming from religious schools tend towards the extreme: plenty are very sheltered, very innocent, very blown away by the chaos of an urban public school. This is especially the case when kids come from parochial middle schools into public high school at 9th grade. Tweens seemed to be treated like big children in private school and like small teenagers in public school.

On the other hand, lots of affluent parents with “wild child” type kids seem to think that religious schools provide a better influence on their kids–which might be true if it weren’t for all the other parents with the same sorts of kids making the same deduction. You get lots of drugs, DUIs, and such at some religious high schools. Some, usually the ones that aren’t stellar academically, really make a living off of these sorts of kids. Once even they can’t take them, these kids end up in public school. And when I say “wild child”, I don’t mean “smokes a little weed”–I mean a constant pattern of extremely risky and aberrant behavior–hard drugs, epic parties, serious property destruction (multiple totaled cars), thefts, arrests.

Basically, any parent who has the means and who has a kid like that is going to try the religious school as a solution at some point. Which means any religious school has more than a few of these kids at any given time. Only the ones with really strict standard for admission and a long wait list manage to really get rid of them.

5

Yes. All the kids are all of the same doctrine. The worst of the kids got their asses kicked out and had to attend public school.

6

The Catholic school I attended from K-7 was extremely sheltered in some ways, and extremely not in others. Sex education, what there was of it, was very, very vague. For example, one time the teacher dropped a reference to “petting” into her lecture, and then very quickly moved on to other topics; it was the first time I’d ever heard the word in reference to dating/relationships, and I had no idea what she meant. I was probably halfway through high school before I figured it out (from friends, not from any adult).

In general, my sex ed was extremely poor, even after I moved to the public schools, because I lived in a hyper-religious small redneck community. They were obligated by law to teach some form of sex ed in schools; but that didn’t mean that they did it remotely well. I learned the biology from my mum. No one at all taught me anything about how to handle romantic/sexual relationships (other than “good girls don’t have sex,” I suppose).

On the other hand, we were not sheltered from violence at all. Our phys ed teacher frequently full-on screamed (complete with frothing at the mouth) at students. On at least one occasion that I know of, he physically assaulted a kid, too (with our entire class of 30 students and our homeroom teacher able to hear the screaming, loud thudding, and crying on the other side of the concrete block wall – he threw a small 10 or 11-year-old boy into the wall). I was regularly bullied from the time I was 7, and just as with the violent teacher, none of the other teachers/admins could be arsed to do anything about it.

7

When I was in high school, the Catholic school girls were always the naughtiest. :wink: (seriously, I dated one and she was into some majorly kinky shit)

8

I suspect that teaching it well isn’t that common anywhere. I grew up in California (central coast), no fuss about religion, but it was pretty similar. I think I learned from book and at home, and I remember explaining the facts of life to my HS boyfriend (who was atheist and from the Bay Area).

9

My boys go to Catholic grade school, and FWIW my kindergartener spent this entire year being chased around by two little girls in his class who wanted to kiss him.

I myself went from Catholic grade school (K-8) into a public high school, and quickly realized just how sheltered I had been in regards to bullies, violence and disrespectfulness towards teachers. That shit *just wasn’t done *in my grade school, and any kid who consistently tested those boundries was asked to leave.

As for sex ed, I think I may be one of those very rare kids who had extensive sex ed in junior high. Not just the biological mechanics, either. We discussed reproduction, disease, premarital sex and the associated pressures, and about 90% of the sex slang I know was first learned in that class. I came across my old notebook from this class a year or two ago and laughed my ass off at my carefully written definitions of “rimming”, “sixty-nine” and “pearl necklace”.

10

Well, the Catholic all-girls high school where I grew up was home to two kinds of girls: the overachieving church-going girls and the naughty girls who were sent there by their parents in the hope they’d shape up.

So you had goody-goody girls and the kinky ones mentioned above.

11

I came out of a Catholic grade school, and was simultaneously too sheltered and not sheltered enough. Very little was taught about sex ed issues, but kids knew things out of context and acted on things without much of a framework.

The other thing, one of the previous posters mentioned, there were kids sent there because they had gotten in trouble elsewhere or they were identified as needing extra help or having a behavioral issue. Rather than owning up to the problem and getting these students appropriate interventions, they sent them to Catholic school hoping the nuns would straighten them out. But we had no nuns, we had undereducated and underqualified lay teachers who were not hired by any other institution. It was kinda hilariously ironic

12

I think they are a lot more sheltered and strict. My kids went to a private christian school and you could hear a pin drop when you walked in.

There was strict dress code so they never had to worry about clothing as an issue. They got a great education. I went to Catholic school grades 1-5 till we moved. It was sheltered from violence, and making out in the halls. I felt safe.

13

When I went from a Christian school to a public school in grade 6, I was a full year behind. I had to do two years in one.

14

In 9th grade we had to go to public school. We had to take the most advanced math and science or it was a repeat of what we did in 8th grade private school. Schools vary on what they teach and there will always be an adjustment when switching.

15

I’d not even been taught how to write.

16

My sophomore year in high school, I met a girl whose name I frankly don’t remember; let’s call her Valerie. She had gone to religious schools for the first 10 years of her public school education, only to have the financial bottoim drop out from beneath her family, forcing her to go to public school for 10th grade. She was extremely sheltered and nervous, and as I was in the upward arc of my asshole phase I made her life extremely uncomfortable in acting class.

She didn’t get a lot of sympathy, sadly. Partly I think it was that a large part of the reason her parents had had her in private school was for racial reasons. She was white in a mostly black school. Many of the black students were irritated enough by her implicit racist assumptions that they wouldn’t defend her against bullying as they should have, and the few white kids in the school found her more contemptible than sympathetic.

God, I wish I could take back that year.

17

Me too. It was a rough transition. I remember being told by a private-school teacher about kids in public school knifing each other, and I totally believed that public school life was akin to maximum security prison.
I also remember in fifth or sixth grade, a girl transferred in from public school, and one day on the playground, she said, “Shit!” We all drew away from her so as not to be struck by the lightning bolt, and she was completely ostracized after that.

18

In my case, it wasn’t so much that I was sheltered as it was the shock of going from a small school where we had two-hundred students, to high school, where there were two-hundred in my graduating class. Our school was actually quite small, but to me, coming from a tiny little parochial school, it seemed HUGE.

It was mostly getting used to the new “structure” of high school, if you will. At St. Mary’s, I was in the same room all day, switching classes back and forth maybe three times, and gym was once a week. And now everything was in a different room, a different teacher, different students – some of them upper classmen, etc. I felt kinda lost in the shuffle. (Especially since I tend to be somewhat shy before I get to know people)

It’s a good thing that I already knew my best friend, Jill – we met from a mutual friend, and so I wasn’t completely alone. Also, my aunt worked as an aid in the resource room, so at least I had a relative there.

Then I began to LOVE my art class, and for the next four years, I was really involved with art. (Art sucked at my old school) And gym was a LOT better – I was in the class for not-so-athletic kids, :wink: and so I didn’t have to worry about the whole, “Oh damn, we have to have GUIN on our team!”

I also had a better time in math and science, because we didn’t have just ONE class – you had a bigger choice of classes to take, not just the same one for everyone. (In other words, if some kids weren’t ready for a certain level, too bad). I failed pre-algebra my sophmore year – so I just took it over again the next year. If that had been the case in Catholic school, I’d probably have had to repeat a grade.

(Plus, my parents never really sheltered me to begin with. :wink:

19

The public school kids got out earlier than we did and they’d walk by our fenced-in school yard. We weren’t allowed to talk to them. One of my classmates said “hi” one time and he got into a lot of trouble, I think he may have even gotten the strap. We would look at them like they were from another planet.

20

Yeshiva boy, here, and boy howdy, yes we’re more sheltered.