parochial school (UNCLASSIFIED)

Wed Apr 6 11:38:12 UTC 2011

I've never heard a C of E school called a 'parochial school' here.  They
are C of E schools, church schools, faith schools (which includes the Hindu
and Muslim and Buddhist schools...).  When I want to describe my US
schooling while I'm in the UK, I never say 'parochial school', for fear of
being misunderstood.

It looks like all of the BNC occurrences (6, but some repeated) of
'parochial school' refer to schools in Scotland--so perhaps it is more
Church of Scotland than Church of England. But there are some CoE schools
with 'parochial' in their names (I see from googling 'parochial school' +
UK. But the ones near me don't have that--they're things like 'St Paul's
Church of England School'. So, it looks to me like 'parochial school' is
not used as a generic term for Christian (of any stripe) schools in current
English English, but it could be a more historical term in some schools
names. (Just as 'infants' school' hangs around in nomenclature, while the
official school levels are now primary/secondary, rather than
infant/junior/form.)

My Catholic-educated-in-UK friends speak of going to a 'convent school',
which I understand to be all-girls, run by nuns. Other ones are just 'Roman
Catholic schools' as far as I can tell...

An old post from my blog on the school levels, if it's of any interest:
<http://separatedbyacommonlanguage.blogspot.com/2006/12/types-of-schools-school-years.html>

Lynne

--On 05 April 2011 17:07 +0100 Dan Goncharoff <thegonch at GMAIL.COM> wrote:

> Doesn't the Church of England call its parish schools "parochial"??
> DanG
>
> On Tue, Apr 5, 2011 at 12:03 PM, Joel S. Berson <Berson at att.net> wrote:
>
>> ---------------------- Information from the mail header
>> -----------------------
>> Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
>> Poster:       "Joel S. Berson" <Berson at ATT.NET>
>> Subject:      Re: parochial school (UNCLASSIFIED)
>>
>> ------------------------------------------------------------------------
>> -------
>>
>> My experience growing up in New York City in the same period a Paul
>> is the same -- I heard of parochial (Catholic) schools and Hebrew
>> schools.  If there were "parochial" (religious) schools for
>> Protestant denominations I wasn't aware of them.
>>
>> That colors my reception today -- if I read "parochial" my thought is
>> "Catholic" unless and until something else changes that presumption.
>>
>> Joel
>>
>> At 4/5/2011 11:11 AM, paul johnson wrote:
>> > paul johnson
>> >
>> > Growing up in Chicago during the 40 and 50s there were parochial (read
>> > Catholic) and Hebrew schools.  Never ever heard of a Jewish school
>> > called parochial, even though almost every one I knew was aware of the
>> > definition.
>> >     Retired here in Arkansas, Christian Academy is code for white, but
>> > to digress, Christian here is code for something I don't fully
>> > understand.  Living in Illinois, Wisconsin and Florida if you asked
>> > someone what religion they were you would get answered with  that named
>> > the sect that they belonged to.  Here a standard answer is "'I'm a
>> > Christian"  Said with just a whiff of aggression, Somewhat like a Cuban
>> > in Miami.
>> >     My guess is that around here Christian means, Republican, right to
>> > bear arms, anti abortion and anti union; plus church going.
>> >
>> > On 4/5/2011 9:54 AM, Charles C Doyle wrote:
>> >> Isn't that simply because until pretty recently nearly all
>> >> "religious" primary and secondary schools in the U.S. were Roman
>> Catholic?
>> >>
>> >> In the South, the burgeoning of Protastant parochial schools
>> >> strangly coincided with the racial integration of public schools . .
>> >> . .
>> >>
>> >> --Charlie
>> >>
>> >> ________________________________________
>> >> From: American Dialect Society [ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU] on behalf
>> >> of Mullins, Bill AMRDEC [Bill.Mullins at US.ARMY.MIL]
>> >> Sent: Tuesday, April 05, 2011 10:40 AM
>> >>
>> >>  From Sunday's _Huntsville Times_:
>> >>
>> >> "Administrators at a Huntsville parochial school say that efforts to
>> >> discuss buying one of the city's public schools have gone without
>> >> response from the school system, despite a financial crisis that will
>> >> force the closure of several schools over the next year.
>> >>
>> >> Officials at Whitesburg Christian Academy and its parent, Whitesburg
>> >> Baptist Church, say they have gone so far as to discuss the idea with
>> >> the realty company handling the sales of four currently empty school
>> >> buildings."
>> >>
>> >>
>> >> Obviously, the writer is using "parochial school" to refer to a school
>> >> with a Baptist background.  I, until this very day, thought that
>> >> "parochial school" meant a school run by the Roman Catholic church.
>> >> OED says "a school established and maintained by a religious body",
>> >> but several of the cites seem to imply that only a Roman Catholic
>> >> school is parochial.
>> >>
>> >> ------------------------------------------------------------
>> >> The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org
>> >
>> > --
>> >
>> > "Whatever doesn't kill me only
>> > makes me suffer and wish I were dead."
>> >
>> > ------------------------------------------------------------
>> > The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org
>>
>> ------------------------------------------------------------
>> The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org
>>

Dr M Lynne Murphy
Senior Lecturer in Linguistics
Director of English Language and Linguistics
School of English
Arts B348
University of Sussex
Brighton BN1 9QN

phone: +44-(0)1273-678844
http://separatedbyacommonlanguage.blogspot.com

------------------------------------------------------------
The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org