It appears her school got more days off than schools in regions which were predominantly one or another.
In the US the only remotely religious holiday kids get off is Christmas. They may or may not have Good Friday off depending on when the spring break is. When I was a kid NY schools had some Jewish holidays off, mostly because so many students and teachers would take off anyway, but I think this is no longer done. That might officially be a city holiday, but it was really a religious one and everyone knew it.
By normal do you mean public? Definitely that. Religious schools wouldn’t have both off, I’d expect.
I remember back to the 80s, and we never went off to Mass in the morning. In AP High School we had a voluntary ecumenical Service at the beginning and end of School year (and very few pupils showed up).
I know that quite well. In fact you might have more than we do. My son-in-law’s parents were very concerned that my wife and I, being from the US, would be religious fanatics. They were quite relieved to find that we were atheists also. My impression is that being an atheist in Germany is a lot more acceptable than being one here, especially in some of our more backward areas.
But that does not change the fact that the state and at least some religions have a lot more links than here. They got married in the US partly because being married in Germany meant either a church wedding or a secular wedding with very few guests allowed in a constrained space. That was Frankfurt.
I think you overestimate the tolerance of some of our religious factions. My comment assumed that only factual data would be taught. Remember, this is the same set of people who believe in significant numbers Obama was born in Kenya.
I agree with you. But you teach facts like evolution in schools and some parents pull their kids out to private religious academies or home school them.
Now maybe, considering the view of governments, the best way to break people from religion is to have government get involved. The “government can do no right” crowd would be really torn.
40 years of so ago I read somewhere that nun porn was popular in France because so many Frenchmen got educated by nuns. If that is popular in the US I’ve had the good fortune not to have noticed. (No links, please!) Perhaps this is similar in a weird way.
That’s why I asked the decade: in the 1950s (and before the Nazis) a lot of schools were not state-run, but catholic or protestant (though following state curricula, so not private in US sense). Until Vaticanum II, Rome told Catholics that they must send their children to the Catholic schools in their area, not the state (secular) or protestant school, unless this was a severe hardship (e.g. secular school 1 km away, catholic school 10 km away).
Not quite. Marriage in Germany is always a secular wedding. A church-only wedding is not valid in Germany.
As for constrained space - that’s not really related to secular vs. Church. City offices, esp. in an expensive town like Frankfurt, can’t afford halls for hundreds of people. (And esp. since it’s not tradition in German culture to invite hundreds of people. We invite close family and close friends - anything about 50 people would be unusual. 100 tops if both bride and groom come from large families or are very active in large clubs)
But not belonging to a Church doesn’t stop anybody from renting a hall after the Standesamt for the celebration.
No, I don’t overestimate the tolerance of your fundamentalists; I don’t care about the fundamentalists. Because we are not a theocracy, but a democracy, we don’t cave to the fundamentalists.
Yes, the concordats influence which religions gets taught - and the lack of an ovearching offical body to talk with is part of the reason Islam as religion has been delayed as school subject (most protestants are organized in the Lutheran Church, not splinters like US), but those who don’t have official plan, they get fact-based religion science.
Yes, but we are a modern democracy, and we signed the UN Rights for Children, where it says that children have a right to education. So home-schooling is forbidden, and as future citizens, our children need to learn basic facts to function in modern society. The rights of the parents to their (crazy) religious beliefs doesn’t trump the right of the children to get facts, or the rights of the state to have educated citizens.