I used to be Irish Catholic- now I'm an American. Y'know, you grow....yeah. I was from one of those Irish neighborhoods in New York. One of those kind of parish schools. Wasn't typical. It was, Corpus Christi was the name of it. Could have been any Catholic church, right? "Our Lady of Great Agony" ..."St. Rita Moreno" ..."Our Lady of Perpetual Motion"- What's the difference what you call it? The church part and the neighborhood part were typical but the school was not. It wasn't one of those old fashioned parish kinda prison schools with a lot of corporal punishment and Sister Mary Discipline with the steel ruler, right? (SMACK!) OOOWWWWW! MY HAND! AAAAUGGH! And you'd fall two years behind in penmanship, right? "Well, he's behind in penmanship, Mrs. Carlin. I don't know why." He's crippled. He's trying to learn to write with his left hand.
We didn't have that. We got..somehow we got lucky, y'know. Got into a school where the pastor was kinda into John Dewey and progressive education and he talked the parish...talked the diocese, rather, into, uh, experimenting in our parish with progressive education and whipping the religion on us anyway and see what would happen with the two of them there. And uh, worked out kinda nice; there was a lot of classroom freedom. There was no..for instance, there were no grades or marks, y'know, no report cards to sweat out or any of that. There were no uniforms. There were no...there was no sexual segregation; boy and girls together. And the desks weren't all nailed down in a row, y'know. There were movable desks and you had new friends every month. It was nice; like I say, a lot of classroom freedom...in fact there was so much freedom that by eighth grade, many of us had lost the faith. 'Cause they made questioners out of us and, uh, they really didn't have any answers, y'know. They'd fall back on, "Well, it's a mystery." "Oh, thank you, Father. I dunno. What's he talkin' about? Mystery."