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Well, I am firmly of the opinion that kids should be brought up with no religion - no anti religion, but definitely no religion
Unfortunatly I just don't think that's possible. Because schools don't just teach us facts, they teach us how to think about those facts. And how you think about things is directly tied to your views of religion and philosophy. If you teach a child to think about facts outside of the context of religion, then you are teaching anti-religion. I don't think there's any way to teach people how to think in a religiously neutral way.

What we end up with these days is that parents who want their children to be publicly educated have to "bolt on" religion after the fact in Sunday School. Since there are conflicts there with what they get at school, this can sometimes be difficult (though sometimes difficult things are the most healthy).

My story is that I was publicly educated with Christiantiy "bolted on" on Sunday mornings. Of course, as many of you know already (because I've told my story before), my parents were very open to letting me make my own decisions. As soon as I was old enough to want to stop going to Sunday School, they let me. It lasted about three weeks as I established my freedom. I explored things of faith and ended up trusting in Christ as my savior. And in the end, my faith looks very different from anyone else in my family (my father is an athiest, my mother is a liberal Christian, and my sister is somewhere in between myself and my mother).

My mother was always asking me questions, causing me to question what I was learning in school and what I heard on the radio. I was huge into Rush, who is definitely NOT a Christian band. She would question lyrics like "why does it happen/ because it happens" and how that made me feel. How it affected my beliefs. It was this healthy upbringing that gave me the freedom to choose faith in Jesus. I was raised in Christianity sort of, but the real decisions were left up to me.

I do lament that the schools seem to emphasize philosophies that I don't hold, but that is the reality of living in a secular world. As my mother showed me, a parent can raise a child to make intelligent faith deicions and not be railroaded by the world around him or her.

If it were only about faith issues, I would probably not choose private schools for my children. But lately it seems that public schools are educating more and more poorly and the best teachers are leaving. When my friends who are teachers in public schools say the won't put their kids in public schools, that causes me pause. And only one of my friends who was a teacher is still doing it- and only part time at that. The rest were just too miserable because of how their hands were tied (and this is not just about religious issues). By contrast, I've met many teachers who work in private schools for less money and are completely happy. It just seems to be a healthier enviornment all around to put my children in a private school. We'll see though, we're still years away from that.
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-Jeff
Rome did not create a great empire by having meetings; they did it by killing all those who opposed them.