Quote:
Originally Posted by betenoire
Meanwhile, back in Ontario, I don't even like the Catholic school board. They are publicly funded by property taxes just like the public schools are (in Ontario) and so far as I am concerned no school that gets government money should be allowed to teach religion.
I want to know, during that hour a day that kids are in religion class, what education are they missing out on that Ontarian public school kids are getting?
(Threads about education in the US always confuse me. I don't get what is so bad about public schools. In Canada hardly anybody goes to private school (why would they?) and the few private schools I'm aware of are either religious, french, or all-girl. And I don't know anybody who went to one.)
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Part of what happened to public school in America is that it became desegregated. I'm about to step into a minefield so I'm going to try to be very careful here.
When it became abundantly clear that public school desegregation was here to stay, Christian academies* (sorry Dapper but that is the term that the people who STARTED these schools used so I have to use that term) sprang up like mushrooms in the Southern United States. In the USA you can discriminate in pretty much any manner you choose if you are a religious institution AND you do not take public funds. This allowed these Christian academies, which were all Protestant and, given the locales, largely (but not exclusively) Southern Baptist to continue to discriminate on the basis of race.
As the culture wars heated up, these schools became more about generically teaching a curriculum that was amenable to specific parts of specific denominations of Christianity. Specifically, these schools became core to teaching a version of American history that would lead students to believe that America was founded on theocratic lines (it wasn't) and that the Earth is much younger than it is (6000 years old as opposed to ~4.5 billion years old) and that while 'mistakes were made' slavery was, on the whole, good for blacks because it brought them to the United States where we could learn of Christianity. That much the same thing could be said of the Native Americans.
It is important to note that I am talking here about schools started by Protestants who were largely Southern Baptists or Methodist with some scattered Presbyterian and Lutheran sects thrown in. I am very specifically NOT talking about Catholic schools because while Catholics are, for any reasonable definition, Christians the schools run by various Catholic diocese were not part of this movement. Nor am I saying that all Christian schools were started for these reasons.
The homeschooling movement is an outgrowth of what happened. Because many of the sectarian schools under discussion here were started on a segregationist basis they have had to avoid taking Federal funds lest they have to open their doors to all students. This has made them more expensive. So families that might not otherwise be able to afford these Christian academies (again, I am using the term because that is the term that the founders of the schools used at the time and I am deferring to their nomenclature) but did not want their kids getting a 'secular' education where they might learn that the United States is a secular nation with a majority Christian population, as opposed to a constitutionally Christian nation, or that human beings are very closely related to chimpanzees, gorillas, pygmy chimps and orangutans, started schooling their kids at home. This is not to say that all home schooled children are in religious families, nor is it to say that all religious home schooled children are Christian nor is it to say that all Christian schools or home schooling parents are doing so for reasons of racial segregation. My only point here is to provide some context on why these schools grew up and how they ended up spawning the burgeoning home schooling movement.
Cheers
Aj