The core problem facing our schools is a moral one.

Ed Andrade is an up-front kind of guy. He is so refreshingly candid about his passions - faith, family, friends, and Catholic education - that there probably have not been many conversations in Ed's life where he needed to be coaxed along with "Come on Ed - tell us how you really feel."

The nursery school my daughter attends is full of bright, lively, privileged children. And yet, if you were to visit the children's bedrooms to explore their libraries, you might be surprised at what you find there: limited and unimaginative collections often dominated by Walt Disney, Berenstain Bears, and Sesame Street.

"It's a bad time to be a boy in America," Christina Sommers says in her important new book, "The War Against Boys." "We are turning against boys," she writes.

Today a young person does not generally go off to the university with the expectation of having an intellectual adventure, of discovering strange new worlds, of finding out what the comprehensive truth about man is. Instead, the primary concern of our best universities is to indoctrinate social attitudes, to socialize, rather than to educate. The result is true philistinism, a withering of taste and a conformity to what is prevalent in the present. It means the young have no heroes, no objects of aspiration. It is all both relaxing and boring, a soft imprisonment.

Towering above all other names in the field of educational philosophy is that of John Dewey.

If the demand for scholarships across the country demonstrates anything, it's the deep dissatisfaction of city parents with their assigned government schools.

The scandal of the label "Generation X" is that so many diverse tastes are encompassed by it. By the very nature of modern pop culture, to employ one style in ministry will inevitably alienate those of a different predilection.

The constitutional barrier, if not already fallen, is now so full of holes - transportation aid, textbook aid, tax credits, etc.- that it no longer has the meaning absolutist church-state separationists wish for it.

On August 11, 1997, Pope John Paul II approved for publication the General Directory for Catechesis as the norm and instrument for the church in fulfilling her fundamental responsibility of teaching the faith.