It is difficult when the parent can't accept that little Junior could ever fail at anything and starts screaming at the teacher, or gets the school's administration on their side to apply pressure to not fail little Junior, even though he's a moron. As much as it is not a popular fact around here, not all teachers are monsters or "Marxist shock troops." It's a difficult job and there's not much support from either school administrations or parents.

Not many are either monsters or Marxists, but they are all Union. The point of an Union is to make its members life easier in every little way.

Giving grades is un-Christian.

No, Christians believe in hierarchy and free will. It's un-egalitarian, which is the opposite.

You may believe in those things, but not Christians.

Bryan makes a good point, though. The one-two punch of a cautious bureaucratic administration and threatening parents of underachievers well-versed in Oprah-speak can demoralize a good teacher pretty fast. I'm a strong believer in parental choice, but I'm not so sure anymore about parental involvement.

Morko:

Oh, sure. And Christians don't believe in keeping score in football games.

Mörkö: I invite you to search the Catechism (I'd do it myself, but I don't have time today) and point out the passage that declares it to be sinful for a teacher to issue an objective-scale evaluation of a student's progress.

Peter, that's an interesting factoid, but do you mean actual football or American "football", which is played with hands?

Mike, Christians are forbidden to judge each other; that's God's job.

Christians are forbidden to judge another person's spiritual worthiness, but any other kind of "judging" is fair dinkum.

Morko:

By that rationale, Christians would be precluded from sitting on the bench, from law enforcement, from officiating sports, and from giving performance evaluations of their employees. Also, if my memory serves, the passage read something like (paraphrasing here) "Judge not, lest you be judged in the same measure that you judge others." This would seem to indicate a warning against spiritual arrogance, not against objective evaluation of performance.

Christians are forbidden to evaluate, eh?

Don't think so.

Maybe this is just Marko's explanation to us of why soccer has so many 0-0 ties.

No, no. True Christianity is indistinguishable from communism, except for the god part. It is no coincidence that communist theory was developed in what was then the most Christian nation on earth, and by a convert to Christianity.

American "Christians", with their love of Mammon and the gun, and their lack of charity and submissiveness, are a nation of Pharisees, and verily, the wrath of the Lord will be upon them.

Jay, You quoted the passage correctly, but my take is that Jesus is warning them that they must apply the SAME standards to themselves as they do to others. It's really an extension of God's requirement in the Old Testament for just weights and measures, and there are several Proverbs that state that using unequal weights and measures is an abomination to the Lord.

In my opinion, he did not say that you would be dealt the same AMOUNT as you dealt out to others, but that the same MEASURE (i.e. measuring cup) would be used to deal out to you that you used to deal out to others. Think Mexico, who strictly enforces its southern border with armed troops, yet yelps when the United States sends Unarmed troops to ITS southern border. Different weight, different measure: abomination to the Lord.

But that's just my surface reading of the text.

Morko: That's some, um, interesting historical revisionism. Communism was a natural development of the "ideas" of the French Revolution in combination with their utter rejection by nearly every people of Europe during the first half of the 19th century. Nothing to do with Christianity in any way, as has been explicated time and again (although you probably go in for the whole Rome-as-whore-of-Babylon schtick, I suppose...).

Mörkö;

Communism doesn't follow from Christianity for one basic reason: Communism presumes the perfectability of Man, Christianity explicitly denies it.

Of course Christianity assumes that men can become perfect, it just happens after death.

Morko: Assessing acamemic grades is not "judging" our fellow Christian, it is no more than discerning differences in the gifrs we have all received. Lamps are not to be hidden under baskets, talents--our Lord's word for the gifts--are to be used to best advantage and to the glory of God.

The levelling impulse has long been with us. Obviously the church in Corinth had enough of a problem with envy and covetousness that the Apostle Paul needed to remind them that different people had different gifts and that this is to be accepted. I Cor, 12:27ff.

"A convert to Christianity"?

Hardly. Marx hated his father for conveniently converting, and he hated the Christian 'God' just for being there.

Communism is exploitative. Christianity is not. Forgotten your Orwell, I take it.