CIIT (Computerized Intergenerational Information Transfer) is hated by the establishment, and, not without reason. It’s a threat to a myriad of interlocking profit centers, from textbook publishers to unions. One would think that the Catholic Church, with it’s historical emphasis on efficiency and low-cost operation, would be among the first to provide children with the least expensive educational alternatives.
Sadly, this is not the case. Even as Catholic Schools in their present form are a huge financial drain on parishes and dioceses, continuing the wasteful spending has taken precedence over the huge cost-cutting possible with distance learning.
A child with a little over a thousand dollars invested in a computer, discs with small libraries full of source material and tutorials, along with a printer and modem is in a position to learn more, at a lower expense, than any previous child in history. The Church has buried its collective head in the sand when it comes to implementing such improvements.
Why hasn’t The Church moved to reduce educational costs to ten or twenty percent of their current cost? This is probably the greatest mystery in a Church that is built upon Mystery.
One guess: If children are learning in independent situations, there is no control over the curriculum. Those on the left greatly prefer that children learn, for instance, the leftist bilge of Thomas Merton rather than the rigorous thinking of Thomas Aquinas. They would far rather have young minds stuffed with drivel from the liberation theologians than absorb the joyful doctrine embraced by Chesterton and Belloc.
The failure of The Church to utilize the cyber-school concept is another indication that it has been hijacked by the far left. The Catholic Schools, in their focus on bricks and mortar, may have become another bastion of leftists who’ve seized the command centers, funded by the voluntary donations from all of us who are faithful.
When any diocese persists in asking people to give money to subsidize continued inefficiency, we have a clear indication of the mindsets that control it. When people have stopped supporting the inefficiencies to such a degree than the individual parishes must have their assets stripped from them to subsidize it, and no one complains, the leftists can certainly think they’ve won.
