Since you are concerned about indoctrination in a belief system other than your own, have you looked into home schooling your children? I know that many Christians home school but it is not a purely Christian phenomena. With homeschooling you are guaranteed that the only beliefs that are expressed to your children are ones that you and your wife (husband, partner) agree with.
The drawbacks of homeschooling are that one adult must stay home to teach. If that is unfeasible in your situation, are there other families in your area that share your wish for secular schooling? Could you get together with these families and have one adult stay home to teach everyone’s children – no dim rooms, no baby-sitting – real teaching.
Maria Montessori did have a strong religious faith and many Montessori schools blend religion with the method – but not all.
They tend to have a strong math program, teaching math concepts to the littlest ones in a conceptual way that makes higher math concepts come easy. Not so sure about science, as they’re not doing a lot of that yet with my kindergartner.
My husband is an atheist but my son goes to a Christian school. Go figure. We were sufficiently impressed with all the things they did right to not mind the “indoctrination.” I know some non-Jewish families who send their kids to the local Jewish school for the same reason.
Thank you for the lead. I’ve heard good things about Montesorri before but I thought it was much more religion-based that what you describe. This is good to hear.
I’d like to say that, in looking back, I think my OP was a two-fold question. I do in fact want to know the options available to us for our son’s education and to that end there have been some very thoughtful and constructive posts. But I think I failed to communicate my other question- Why haven’t there been more secular places of education? It seems to me the future will be determined by how we teach these children and what we stress as important. To me, this is the Basics along with science, history and critical thinking.
IIRC, it was Brigham Young who understood that those children with higher education and thinking skills will grow up to be politicians and captains of industry. The leaders in the coming world. That being the case, why is there no more effort on the part of those of nonsecular leanings to establish a system of quality education. Why is it that when we go to find a quality preschool, they all are well below an acceptable standard, except for those run by churches? I don’t know if this is a question that can be answered or is rhetorical in it’s very nature.
Is it permissable to high-jack your own thread?
Thanks for listening.
As has been pointed out, some Catholic schools don’t push their religious beliefs strongly to their students. But some do. It does depend on the school. It’s also worth noting that Catholic schools usually give preference to Catholic students over non-Catholic students when there’s pressure on enrolment numbers.
My best guess, and this is just off the top of my head here, is lack of sufficient clientele because people in the U.S. are pretty invested in the idea of a free public education. Most parents aren’t amenable to paying tuition for those 12 years before college. What’s going to shake them out of that mindset? Lots of spare money might, but wealthy families tend to live in great school districts, so they may not feel the need even if they could afford it. What else? Some belief system strong enough to make them carve tuition out of their family budget for an education that promotes it. Bingo, religion.
Another factor in while you’ll find more religious school than secular: some churches/parishes/denominations see the provision of education an important part of their mission to their believers or to the community. Enough so that they are willing to subsidize the cost of running a school. There aren’t many secular organizations with that same mindset, to my knowledge.
What increases the financial viability of religious schools, I suspect, is that some additional families will send their kids to religious schools even if they don’t care that much about religion. Like me, for example. They may like the method, or the small size of the school/classes.
I’d like to add that I think the type of people who are atheists, agnostics, or deists tend to also be the ones who most strongly support a good free public education. I think those groups, having seen the flaws in organized religion are also more likely to see the flaws in a private education. A private school is always going to have a goal other than educating your child. It might be to indoctrinate a religion, or to stick to a particular style of teaching (and expel any students who don’t respond well to it*) or to keep test scores high enough (often by cherry-picking students) so it can raise tuition every year and cherry-pick even more aggressively. A public school has, or should have, education for all as its only goal. As a side benefit, your child will interact with children from all classes, rather than the upper-middle class and a few token scholarship students. I think our country will be better if future leaders, captains of industry, and politicians have gone to school with kids whose parents struggled to pay the rent each month.
It might amaze you that more private secular schools don’t exist. It amazes me that some parents will proudly pay $5,000-$30,000 per year per child for private school, but they won’t put in any time or money to improve their local public schools.
*my brother was expelled from a Montessori kindergarten for figuring out how to remove the child-proof locks from the windows.
I’m not sure I agree with a number of your assertions in here, such as your general assumptions about how deists feel about education, or what private schools see as their goals, or that parents who shell out private tuition are “proud” of it.
But I’ll stick with this–I am not sure how ol’ Maria Montessori would regard removing a childproof lock. Probably think the child was a genius who was rightfully curious about the world around him–but needed help focusing on safe classroom tasks. I dunno. I’m not that up on everything Montessori. But your brother’s expulsion isn’t sufficent evidence that his school had a goal to expel every child who didn’t respond to Montessori teaching.
Excuse me, I put in money to improve my local public schools. It’s called taxes, around $8000 per year, and the school district is shit. Why? Because it has a huge population of kids that come from households where education isn’t thought of highly. I say this because these kids cause trouble, hassle kids who want to study, extort money from them, I could go on. If public schools were free to throw out these little bastards and not have to spend time/money trying to discipline these kids (who should have learned discipline at home) then I’d have give public school a chance. The lunatics run the asylum. It’s “let’s spend 80% of the resources on the difficult 20% of the population.” No wonder there’s no money for sports and arts, it’s all being WASTED on incorrigibles.
So I have to shell out another $8000 for private school. But you know what, good daycare costs that much in these parts, so the pinch isn’t too bad. But I would prefer to sock that money away for college.
I think that Cranky has hit it here. Organized churches already have buildings. They have a set group of people who want to see their church grow. They already have a budget of some type. Adding a school is just another part of their program. Once it gets started based on this dynamic, it may very well grow to outsize the church, but the church helps the school through the initial phases and often subsidizes it even later on.
I know of no non-religious group that has a set body of people, a budget apart from the school, and a place to start a school rent free.
Hmmm. I thought I had something worthehile to add to Cranky’s note, but on preview I see I could have just stopped after the first sentence. Oh well.
BwanaBob- I fully agree with what you’ve added. The Public School System is oft times sorely lacking. The need to dumb-down everything so that no on excels is counter productive to those who want to learn and deserve recognition for their hard work. This is the central point I think. Why are the only options the PSS or a church-based system?
BoringDad & Cranky- I think your point is accurate. Seems a shame though. Were is the financial backing for the United Secular School Resource program.
Er, on second thought, maybe the USSR is not the name to go with.