Living Humanist Values and Nuns Teaching Public School?

[0:01] This is Glass City Humanist, a show about humanism, humanist values, by a humanist. Here is your host, Douglas Berger. I discuss our efforts to refresh and revise our group’s Ten Commitments prize wheel we use at our information booth. Then I look at President Joe Biden dropping out of the 2024 election and how his selfless action relates to our humanist values. And finally, I tell the history about some Catholic nuns teaching public school in rural Ohio in the 1960s and the 1970s. Glass City Humanist is an outreach project of the Secular Humanists of Western Lake Erie, building community through compassion and reason for a better tomorrow.

[0:47] Music.

[0:59] One of the things that we do as a group, the Secular Humans of Western Lake Erie, is we have information booths at community events. We like to say community events. Usually it’s just one or two because we’re still a small group. We had a booth at the Old West End Festival in June, and then we also plan on having a booth at the Maumee Summer Fair in August.

[1:30] And so one of the things that we try to do besides just handing out literature and educating the public about humanism is we try to we try to do stuff that is fun for the kids, you know, because kids, they don’t care about brochures. You know, they don’t they don’t want they don’t want to be educated about humanism in the way that adults do. And so we tried to figure out things to do to reach kids. And one of the ideas that I had last year was a spinning wheel. A lot of booths and trade things, they do that, is people come in and spin a wheel, and then they win a prize. And usually that prize is some kind of swag from that organization, like a sticker or a bookmark or something like that. And what it does is it makes it fun for kids because kids want to spin things and whatever. But we also wanted to make it a learning situation where not only the kids would be exposed to humanism, but if they were with a the parent would also be exposed and try to make a connection about, you know, the things that we’re trying to show the kid, and maybe the kid will ask questions later. Who knows? That’s what we hope for.

[2:58] So we had this, so I got, you know, went to Amazon, got one of these wheels, spinning wheels with the wedges on it, the colored wedges, and it had a plexiglass cover on it so you could write on it, and it came with pens and erasers and things like that. But that’s not what we were going to do. What I elected to do, and I’ve talked about this before, is I created wedges that related to the Ten Commitments. I think there was 15 or 14 wedges on this prize wheel and 10 commitments.

[3:41] And then we had some leftovers that we did some free spaces and things like that. So we did that. And what I did was I took a big poster size of the 10 commitments and cut it up and pasted it with rubber cement onto this wheel. Worked out great. Didn’t have a problem with it. That I had to hand edit and create and print off some of the segments so that it would read correctly when it was up in the air on the wheel so you could read it, even though it didn’t look like the 10 Commitment wheel.

[4:20] And did that was a hit. it. Then this year, we took it to the Old West End Festival, and we had an overnight rain shower, which we were anticipating, and so we tried to cover everything that was paper that might get wet, and thought we had the wheel covered, and unfortunately, the wind or something blew the cover up. And so a couple of the, a couple of the, uh, paper, uh, 10 commitment wedges got wet and ruined them. So the rest of the weekend, whenever somebody would spin the wheel and hit that wedge that you couldn’t read, then, you know, made a little bit harder. So decided to go ahead head then, and since we were, I was going to have to replace some of those wedges that we were going to have, we were just going to redo the wheel, we were going to redo it.

[5:23] Um, one of the things that we decided to do was that in the 10 commitments, you had the, the commitment, say responsibility. Then it had a short blurb about it. Like I’m going to be responsible. And then it had a longer blurb talking about like for, it says every day, each of us makes choices. These choices, large and small, all have consequences for ourselves and for the world around a lot of, a lot of text. And what we wanted to do is, you know, we originally, when we did this prize wheel, is the kid would spin it and let’s say hit responsibility. And then we would ask them, what do you think responsibility is? And then, and if they did it, they knew or know, then somebody would read that big honking text. And it just got to be the point where it was taking too too much time and the kid didn’t care. He just wanted his little toy dinosaur or whatever fidget toy we had. So we just chucked that part out. You know, we still did a little bit of education, but not as much as we had originally anticipated.

[6:36] So what we did was when we went ahead and redid the wheel, we, we, um, revised it is I created new wedges, pie shaped wedges, and they were all based on the 10 commitment. So you had, and it was the same format. You had the commitment and then you

[7:00] had just a little bit, uh, like a little bit of clip art that was with the original one. And then And instead of that big blob of text, what we did was we started with ChatGPT, the AI.

[7:19] Chat thing where you could ask it questions and it would print out text and wouldn’t have to work as hard. And so we used some ChatGPT and put in these big blobs of text and asked it to write like an inspirational message based on that text. And then once we did that, then we took it and edited it more, you know, because you can’t just cut and paste something from an AI tool and expect it to be good. And so we took it and redid it. I edited it, and Sean did too. She took it, took care of some of it. And so we took these aspirational messages and put it on these wedges. So we kind of reduced it down to a sentence or two. So, for example, you know, I said what that big text was for responsibility. Every day each of us makes choices. These choices, large and small, all have consequences for ourselves and the world around us, etc., etc. And what that worked down to when we did responsibility was, I embrace responsibility by accepting accountability for my choices, knowing that they shape the reality I inhabit.

[8:47] I like that. And so it’s kind of like that, you know, those inspirational posters with the little kitty cat hanging from the tree. And it says, hang in there, bud. But it’s not cringeworthy. It’s not, you know, this is something I wouldn’t mind. And I’m not saying that what the AHA did with the big text blurbs and everything, that’s fine. I mean, that’s still, that’s details. But what we wanted to do was we wanted to make it active. We wanted it to mean something so that when somebody would read it, then it would be internalized.

[9:27] And so we did that, and it really turned out well. And then we also did rework some of the free stuff, free spaces. We did a free space. Then we had one that we called Name a Dinosaur. I have no idea what the name of dinosaurs are, but little kids do, younger kids do. And so we just had a pie shape on there that said, name a dinosaur. And the point is, it doesn’t matter what dinosaur they name. It’s going to be correct and it’s going to win a prize. I’m, you know, we’re not going to force people to learn the names of dinosaurs. And then another wedge that we created for it to take the place of one of the free ones was Random Science Fact.

[10:21] And so that one is kind of like a redo of what we originally intended with the prize wheel. Is they’ll land on a random science fact and then we’ll have on paper a printout, random science facts and we’ll read one of them.

[10:42] Just something to do. The other ones that carried over from the previous version of the prize wheel was Toledo Humanist, you should know. We have Gloria Steinem, Edward Lamb, and Madeline Murray O’Hare. And then we have a little biography blurb if they’ve never heard of them and talk to them about that. And then the other one was Free Spin. them. So they, and so I took, got colored paper that kind of matched the color on the wheel and printed them on the printer and cut them out. And this time, instead of using rubber cement, which was messy and goopy, I used double-sided tape and it’s going to make it a lot easier to repair it and fix it up if it gets damaged from water again. And so I just basically, you know, that’s kind of what I wanted to talk about in this segment, was that we redid the prize wheel. So if you visit us at the Maumee Summer Fair in August, August the 10th from 9 to 5 p.m., try out the spin the wheel and get a prize and learn something about humanism.

[11:57] Hello, this is Douglas, host of the Glass City Humanist, inviting you to listen to selected segments of The Glass City Humanist on Toledo Community Radio Station WAKT, 106.1 FM, Tuesdays at 7 p.m. Eastern Time. If you can’t listen to us on the radio, you can live stream us on toledoradio.org or visit our On WAKT page on our website glasscityhumanist.show for past episodes.

[12:30] Music.

[12:38] I’m sure I’m not the only one that realized the historical importance of what happened on Sunday, July the 21st, when the news came out in the afternoon that President Joe Biden had decided to withdraw from the 2024 election.

[13:05] I know that they had been talking about it for several weeks, and a lot of the discussion was distressing, especially for me as a progressive-oriented person. I do want to say that, you know, I’m not going to endorse or not endorse somebody, but it was distressing to me to hear the talk about President Biden getting out of the race. It really was distressing because of the fact that it was based on his age and whether or not he had the energy and the vigor to campaign against the other old guy that’s in the campaign. And so it was a little disheartening the whole time. But once he had announced that he, you know, President Biden announced that he was withdrawing and that he was endorsing his vice president to take his place, you know, you could sense the historical impact.

[14:16] I guess, environment that that took place in. And, you know, we get that sometimes where something monumental happens. I mean, a lot of people remember where they were when 9-11 happened.

[14:36] My parents’ generation, they know where they were when they heard that Kennedy was assassinated and things like that. And we’re in this age of 24-hour news cycles, so we can watch cable news pundits talk about these things for hours on end. I know I spent a couple hours listening to some pundits talking about it. Um but well the reason why i’m talking about it now and i’m talking about it in this particular, show is that the one of the things one of our humanist values that we always try to teach people about and it’s part of our 10 commitment 10 commitments you know we have a couple of them that would cover this whole situation. One of them is service and participation. I will help my community in ways that let me get to know the people I’m helping.

[15:41] A lot of people were talking about how President Biden put the country over himself. Now, that’s probably going to be debatable in the future, but that was one of the reasonings that some of these pundits were talking about, that President Biden has always put himself ahead of the party, ahead of himself, and tried to do things that would help the country as a whole.

[16:13] The other 10 commitment that would cover this would be responsibility, that I will be a good person even when no one is looking, and own the consequences of my actions. Uh, we know that one particular candidate is very good at, uh, being responsible and another candidate, not so good. Uh, we have plenty of examples not to, you know, drag stuff through the mud again. And, uh, and so that, that’s the thing that, you know, we try to do is we try to be responsible for our actions as humanists. We try to be responsible for our actions. And then we also try to do good in the community. We try to give back. The Secular Humanists of Western Lake Erie, the group that I’m part of that sponsors this podcast, we try to give back. We’re still a pretty small organization, but we try to do that. And one of the things that we gave back was for Darwin Day, we worked and volunteered at the Seagate Food Bank.

[17:27] And help them with a project that they were working on called Project PJ, where they were gathering up children’s clothing in packages that they could then give to kids who were in certain situations where they didn’t have anything. The other thing that we’ve been doing recently is we’ve been having our kids’ movies at the West Branch Toledo Library.

[17:56] And that’s been at the end of the month, the last Saturday of the month. And we saw a need for that. The West Toledo branch is in Library Village. That is in an area that is struggling economically, socioeconomically, where at the beginning of the month everybody has money because public assistance goes out and some people get their disability payments or whatever. And then by the end of the month, people are struggling because they have paid all their bills and you might have some kids that want to do stuff and you can’t do stuff because you don’t have any money. So we decided to have these free pizza and movie nights or afternoons in the library, in the auditorium in the basement, to help, to give back to this community so that these kids would have something to do at the end of the month.

[19:00] And so that’s why it was very heartening to me to see a politician like President Biden make that self-sacrifice, to give up that attempt to stay in power, to go for a re-election, to give that up because he thought it was more important for the country to have a candidate that could go against the other person.

[19:37] And, um, and so I, I really think that that’s a good thing. You know, um, I know there’s, there’s plenty of politicians in this country that, that do that on a regular basis, um, that they work with their constituents and make sure that they’re available. And then we also have a large swath of politicians who are always, what is it about, you know, their, their political work? You know, it’s always what’s in it for me? You know, they don’t really care. They don’t do, like, for instance, some congressional representatives in Ohio don’t meet with their constituents at all. They don’t hold town hall. Well, they’re called town halls where somebody, you know, you go to like a veteran, a VFW post or something like that and get to question your elected official. Now, that doesn’t mean you’re totally closed off. It just means that they’re not going out into public trying to defend their record to the electorate. And usually people that show up to these town hall meetings aren’t your fan. It’s not your fan club, you know, because if you’re taking the time to go to one of these events, to travel, to talk to your congressperson, usually it’s not for a good thing.

[21:04] And so I understand why some of these congressional people don’t do town halls, because they don’t want to get the backlash. They don’t want to be held accountable. They don’t want to be responsible for their job.

[21:20] All they want to do is get their paycheck.

[21:25] And they want the power and the prestige that comes from holding an elective office. But again, not all politicians, not all elected officials are like that. Even if people tell you they may be like that, they’re not like that. So you know this historical thing about biden dropping out and endorsing his vice president kamala harris is it’s those times it’s one of those times that i feel good about being an american is when stuff like it happens you know where where you you think it’s happening as it should. And it’s a good thing. It’s a positive thing.

[22:18] Selling weapons to Israel to perpetrate genocide in Palestine is a negative thing that the United States does, or when they more often than not support dictators or have a history of supporting dictators. You know, that’s not a good thing. But when this happens, when you have the most powerful person in the world decide, hey, you know, you’re right. I don’t think I can go on. And I want my vice president to take my place.

[22:58] You know, and people have compared it to George Washington. George Washington was president for two terms. He could have stayed president for the rest of his life. In fact, some of the founding fathers wanted to anoint him as a king. But he decided that the country was more important than his political ambitions. That and the fact that he didn’t have any political ambitions. He just wanted to go back to Mount Vernon and continue to be a rich white guy making money. So he decided not to continue on as president. And now, you know, we have the constitutional amendment that caps the number of terms somebody can have to two, and that was a result of Franklin Delano Roosevelt. He came into office during the Great Depression. Obviously, he did a good job because he got re-elected four times. He served four terms as president. And, in fact, then he died in office.

[24:15] But anyway, so, I mean, that’s why they They initiated that amendment to the Constitution to say that somebody could only be president for two terms because FDR kept getting elected and they wanted to stop him from getting elected. It was a political reason. But anyway, so that’s basically all I want to talk about, you know, that big monumental news. It really fits into our humanist values. And so it’s a good example of service and participation and responsibility. For more information about the topics in this episode, including links used, please visit the episode page at glasscityhumanist.show.

[25:09] One of my hobbies is an interest in public school consolidations, especially the rash of consolidations that took place in northwest Ohio in the 1950s and 60s. For example, in my county that I grew up in, Hancock County, There’s a school district called Riverdale, and it came into being when the villages of Forest, Mount Blanchard, and Wharton merged their schools in 1962. And so this past weekend, I happened to be looking at the website for the Seneca East local schools in Seneca County. I believe they were on the eastern side of Seneca County, over by the town of Attica. It was formed from the merging of school districts from Republic and Attica in 1970. And on the website, they had digitized most of the yearbooks, yeah, a lot of the yearbooks from the 1920s to present of the former schools.

[26:26] And I had a college roommate that graduated from Seneca East, so I checked on the Attica yearbook to see if it had any information about the consolidation, so I didn’t have to go looking for old newspaper articles. And the yearbook that I looked at was 1970. It didn’t have any specific information, but it did note that the next year Seneca East would start up, because that’s when the new merged district would start up is in the 1971 school year. But what I did find was really interesting to me as a humanist and somebody who supports church-state separation. In the pages for the faculty, there was a picture of several nuns.

[27:19] Catholic nuns. And that just was mind-boggling because, you know, I am so used to there being strict separation of church and state and public schools, I had never heard about nuns teaching public schools. So I had to find out what this was all about, and I had a theory, but I needed proof. You know, I kind of had an idea of how this occurred, but I wanted to see if I could find any like documented proof, like a newspaper article or some other kind of information.

[27:55] In 1968, there was a small local school district called Seneca Huron, and it was located around the villages, or not really even villages, like little spots where where they probably used to have a train depot, for Bismark, Reed, Thompson Township. And they had three school buildings that only taught kindergarten through sixth grade. Then after the sixth grade, the kids would have to attend a district like Attica or to the north, Monroeville, or a district closer to their home, because the Seneca-Huron School District had a large land area to cover. fairly large. Seneca-Huron was forced to merge in 1968 by the state because at the time a law had been passed that required local school districts to provide kindergarten through 12th grade. And if they weren’t able to do that, then they were going to have to merge with a district that did have a high school. And so that’s what happened. Seneca-Huron merged with Attica in 1968 and in 1970 then it became Seneca East.

[29:18] The nuns I saw in the Attica yearbook, and let me clarify, too, this wasn’t the high school yearbook. This was a yearbook for the whole school district because they had a lot of rural school districts. This happened. My mom attended Macomb, and they had this as well. The front part of it was the high school, and then in the back part of it, then you had the elementary students had their pictures. and activities and things. So it was a whole district yearbook.

[29:52] So the nuns I saw in the Attica yearbook taught in the Seneca-Huron district. And by the time the district dissolved, it had one building that they built, a brand new building in 1966.

[30:06] And that took the place of the three elementary buildings that they previously had. And this was located at a place on the map called Bismark. Just off of State Route 4, north of Attica. So they consolidated their three elementaries into that single building before then they merged with Attica. And one of the elementaries that merged into that single building was in Bismark. And that was just like a couple of miles down the road. And Bismark was the location of San Sebastian Catholic Parish. And the church had a school at some point. I believe the church turned over their school to the local public school district or the building to operate and the nuns went along with the school. Kind of like they had all this school furniture and that went with the building and so did the teachers. And I did see in a news article in 1967, before the merge with Attica, that a nun was the principal of Seneca-Huron Elementary, because she gave a little talk to the Board of Education about some funding or something.

[31:26] So I really wanted to know a couple of questions. It left me with some questions. If the public school district, I wanted to know, first of all, did the public school district pay the nuns, or did that come from the Catholic Church?

[31:44] And if there was any religion classes once the school became a public school. Because about that time in 1963, that was the last of the school prayer Supreme Court cases got decided. It was in 1963.

[32:02] And so I just was wondering if they continued to have religion classes because they had nuns in this public school. Now, the school was a public school. It received tax dollars. They had a Board of Education, but it had once been attached to St. Sebastian Catholic Church. And I didn’t see any—I looked further in some of the yearbooks, and I didn’t see any nuns in the pages of the yearbook after 1970. I think there might have been maybe one or two in 1971, so I’m guessing they probably left soon after Seneca Huron merged with Attica. So I’m not sure when they left. I looked. There wasn’t any newspaper articles, the nuns are leaving, or anything like that. I just know it would really be unusual for a public school to hire nuns to teach. It really would. Even back when religion was so ambiguous in public schools, they wouldn’t hire nuns to teach a public school. A Catholic school, yes. And where I grew up in Hancock County in Findlay, Findlay had its own Catholic school. So I never had any nuns teaching me in any of the elementary schools I went to.

[33:22] The single elementary building became known as Seneca-Huron Elementary, and it was closed in 2007 when Seneca East built a new single campus just outside Attica. And a lot of the rural districts did this once the state gave them more money to build new schools. A lot of these rural districts that consolidated, they had multiple buildings in different towns. And so it would be cheaper, not only for maintenance costs, but also transportation costs would be cheaper if they consolidated all the school buildings into one campus. Campus so you have the high school the middle school or junior high and the elementary all on the same piece of property and sometimes in the same building that aren’t that’s kind of attached to each other or it might be seat there might be a breezeway or something like that because they want to keep the children segregated but by grades and and so that’s what they did so in 2007 In 2007, then, they closed Seneca Huron. The information I have on that building, it still exists. It’s still there.

[34:45] St. Sebastian Catholic Church was closed about that same time. They closed in 2005 due to declining enrollment, declining parishioners.

[35:01] And that was in 2005, and the church was deconsecrated. And there was a big, huge brouhaha over that, similar to, I believe it’s St. Mary’s Church on the east side of Toledo, where community members want to buy it, and the church said no. Well, this happened in the same way at St. Sebastian. They had local people around the church whose family had been going to that church practically since it was built in the 1850s. That parish was built in the 1850s. They wanted to buy the church and the church said no. And they ended up demolishing the church itself in 2018. 18. A local person did purchase the church property, which also included the school building, the old school building, and a nunnery. And they turned the school building, it looked like the school building from the pictures I saw, into a senior and community center.

[36:07] And so I think that’s where Bismark School used to be before they moved down the road to Seneca Huron. And so So when I posted this information in a Facebook group I was in and asking questions about it, I did have a conversation with a couple of people whose parents went to that school or they had relatives that went to that school. And they said that, yes, even though it was a public school and they weren’t supposed to do any religion classes, usually they said the religion class was before school. They said the fact that it was a nun teaching the class, they said invariably some religion would seep in.

[36:51] And so I just thought that was very interesting, you know, that this happened in a rural area. Because a lot of times you’d have, you know, mile after mile after mile of cornfield. And then you’d have this huge Catholic church. And then usually either beside the church, sometimes across the street, you’d have a school building.

[37:21] And, you know, they wanted to teach their children their version of Christianity. And they couldn’t get it done in the local schools because the public schools, they had the Protestant prayers and the Bible, the Protestant Holy Bible. And they were very much opposed to Catholics even coming into their school back then.

[37:50] For decades. And so that’s why a lot of times a lot of these Catholic churches, a lot of these Catholic parishes built their own school because they had such trouble fitting in and being accepted in a public school. Now that all changed after they had those Supreme Court cases that said you couldn’t do any religious anything religious in a public school. So that made it more hospitable for people that might have sent their kids to

[38:26] a Catholic school because they had a religious disagreement. Now, we also know, too, that a lot of these private religious schools, not necessarily Catholic schools, were also created in a lot of areas as a response to school desegregation after the Brown v. Board of Education in the 50s.

[38:56] And so they wanted to make sure that the white kids didn’t have to deal with any black kids. And so they went off and formed their own schools. It didn’t necessarily have anything to do with being Catholic, because usually the Catholics weren’t that way. Catholics were usually pretty good at including African Americans in their schools. Schools, but these private religious schools, they would use that as an excuse that, you know, they’d use the religious as an excuse to mask their bigotry. So I just thought it was pretty interesting. You know, I just kind of, if I hadn’t seen that picture of the nun in the yearbook, I wouldn’t have gone down that rabbit hole. And I was, I’m pretty glad I did. I really liked that history, and it just shows you how public schools have changed even in, what was that? That was in 1970, even in 50 years, 55 years, where you’d have nuns teaching classes to where you’re not supposed to have religion in the school. And I think that’s very interesting. Thank you for listening. For more information about the topics in this episode, please visit the episode page at glasscityhumanist.show.

[40:26] Glass City Humanist is an outreach of the Secular Humanists of Western Lake Erie. Sholi can be reached at humanistswle.org. Glass City Humanist is hosted, written, and produced by Douglas Berger, and he’s solely responsible for the content. Our theme music is Glass City Jam, composed using the Amplify Studio. See you next time!

[40:55] Music.