Why My Children Will Never Go To A Religious School…
I attended a lecture a few months back (before I started this blog) entitled “Enemy in the Mirror: Richard Dawkins, the New Atheists and their Crusade against Fundamentalism”. It was nothing special, and the “lecturer” didn’t actually talk about anything to do with the subject. She just went on a random rant about how everyone should respect the church etc.
However, after the lecture there were a lot of questions asked from the audience, a large majority of whom were openly atheist. One such question was from a theist (towards the atheists) who complained that we argue all the time about religion and yet send our children to catholic schools and CofE schools with no problems. The parents in the audience said they do this because the results from those schools are better than those at non-religious schools, and they wanted the best for their kids.
I’ve got no problem with people doing that, they want their kids to do well. However I personally do not trust education systems that rely on religion to get students. The only reason that these students are getting better marks is because of the high levels of discipline those schools have, and the only thing large amounts of discipline does is inhibit creativity. You are taught what to think and how to think, and completely ignore the principles that freethinking was founded on.
The education system in England is a strange one. Public schools have to teach Evolution, and cannot teach I.D (for reasons we discuss in this forum thread). However, private schools (often religious in nature) can teach extra things to the standard curriculum. I know of Catholic schools in London that teach I.D far more than Evolution, and even have students learning that Noah took dinosaurs on the Ark. They are creating the next generation of Young Earth Creationists, and it sickens me to think of what they will be like in the future.
I used to think America had a better deal in education. Secularisation made sure that I.D was kept out of the schools, and that useless things like prayer were also removed in an official nature. Even the fundamentalist Liberty University has to teach Evolution (alongside I.D of course). Today, I’m not sure where I stand. It seems that everywhere Creationists are using loopholes to push their agenda onto innocent minds, in order to corrupt and control them. A couple of states have surrendered currently, but who knows how many it will be in a years time?
A lot of schools should take a good look at English universities. They seem to have a nice balance between education and belief, and I should know. My university is supposedly secular (although the CU would like to ammend that), and in lectures we are given the facts and told to think for ourselves. One of my friends is currently doing a PhD in Crypto Zoology, a course that doesn’t even exist, but to which the university has found adequate for him to form a theisis on.
The future doesn’t rely on religion, it relies on free thinking. I want my children to learn in an environment which will give them the ability to work things out for themselves, and I fear a religious setting will only hinder that and make them slaves to the false doctrine they support.
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I am one of those atheist folks considering sending his children to a private Catholic school. I really have no bone to pick with I.D. being taught, as that is what I would expect from a Catholic school. They’re a private school, and the whole point with a private school is that they get to emphasize what they feel is important without the constraints of a public school.
Public schools nowadays are every bit as ‘religious’ as any Catholic school when it comes to teaching multi-culturalism, global ‘awareness’, global warming, homosexuality and so on. Those are things I would much rather impart to my children myself, but many public schools now are so political and downright activist in nature, that they will impart this information to children at a very young age in THEIR own way, and sometimes even without telling the parents.
The bottom line for me is this: In a catholic school, I can read the literature and ask the questions and have a relatively complete understanding in 15 minutes of EXACTLY where they stand on any issue I care to raise. It doesn’t matter if I agree with their stance on this or that; what matters is that I KNOW.
Ask a public school official where they stand on ‘this or that’ and you will get a lot of waffling and double talk. No thanks.
Reading, Writing and Arithmetic. So long as they cover those, I don’t mind if there’s a slant towards Intelligent Design. My children will learn more debating that against the evidence with their own hearts and minds than they will being fed ‘the truth’ at a public school, in my opinion.
I went to Catholic schools for 12+ years in the 1980’s in the USA and I never heard of ID or creationism. We were taught in high school biology Darwin, Mendel (a priest) and finally Watts and Crick. Even today that is the policy at my alma mater. ID and creationism are simply not true. These people who put this in public schools should be dismissed out of hand. Luck would have it that these folks are getting voted off school boards, deo gratias. We cannot have these people teaching scientific nonsense and passing it off as true fact. Though there is a creationist museum in KY where the Flintstones are presented as true ancient history.
@skipkent
I must disagree. I’m currently a high school student in California, and I have attended public schools since the third grade.
It’s easy to confuse teaching with advocacy.
Let me assure you that there is no conspiracy and no “activism”. Public schools do touch on those subjects, when they apply to the material being taught (multi-culturalism in World History, possibility of global warming in Biology, etc.), but there is no intellectual force-feeding, which on the other hand is rather rampant in the hard-line religious schools. What is occurring is dialogue – students are encouraged to voice their opinions and discuss. I ask, which would you rather have: students being aware of real happenings in this world, or students being exposed to some fantasy concocted by superstitious nomads over 2000 years ago?
If education is just a bubble where you hear only what you want, how can you be prepared to what awaits you in the “real world”?
The vague positions of public education officials is actually due to the neutrality policy of the establishment.