Religious schools- Would you send your child if you're a non believer?

[Jzee]

I had a very strong catholic upbringing and went to an all girls catholic school which I learnot to hate and consequently I am now not a practising catholic. All of the state schools nearby are awfull and I have heard of alot of people who have suddenly started going to church just to get their kids into the better nearby Catholic/ Church of England schools. This is not for me as if I don't believe in something then I feel it's hypercritical to suddenly start attending church just to get my kids into a good school church school.

I do agree completely Frances that you are either Christian or not. I was struggling to find a comparable description for my dad versus my MIL who is Hindu/ Indian and my mum who is ethnically Jewish. Way too complicated!!

I also absolutely agree that young children aren't able to really be a religion by choice - it is just the way their parents are bringing them up and this is exactly why I found these categorisations of children at a prep school so annoying. I was talking to my dh about it and really we think it was a supposedly more PC way of talking about the racial or cultural mix.

As my ds shows by way of example, things just can't be simplified so.

I don't think we will be going down the route of looking for a secular state school and will go private as luckily we are able to afford it and therefore avoid the less than ideal secular primaries near here.

If there were good secular primaries maybe we wouldn't have to opt out and also everyone who doesn't happen to be able to, or want to, send their kid to a Cof E, Catholic or Jewish school (they are the main religious schools near here) would get better schooling for their children.

Grrr rant over

I think most private schools are more religiously mixed. My daughter's school did have Catholic mass she could attend, C of E assemblies too, Jewish assembly every day and also Hindu, Sikh etc societies within the school. All the RE in all my children's private schools has given equal balance to all religions.

Which school would Jesus have gone to? He was born virtually out of wedlock to someone who was about 14 at the time from a very poor home so presumably he would have gone to the worst sink school of the lot.

It's a pity if you have to pick a religion to get a good state school education. It used to be if you passed the 11+. So used to be based on brains and now it's based on parental religion or parental sense which is much less fair.

No.

We faced this problem last year when trying to get our dd into a primary school. The five closest schools are all religious and require evidence of 'sympathy with the school's Christian ethos' in order to have your application considered. So there's a dilema. How to you show sympathy with the ethos that denies dd's favourite aunt and her parent's best friend, who she adores, the right to live their private lives in loving relationships? How do you show sympathy with an ethos that proudly declaims it's institutional sexism?

So instead we had to bite the bullet and apply to the nearest, oversubscribed, state school, which we were lucky enough to get into, even though it requires a journey of half an hour in each direction.

I agree with Jzee. I went to a Catholic primary school and the bigotry taught there nowdays makes me catch my breath.

When I was a child,my family never went to church, but I went to a Church of England school where the rector taught RE, we went to a Church service in school time every week in Lent & Advent & on Ascension Day. We had no choice, it was the only school in the village. It didn't have the slightest effect on my beliefs or my life except that I enjoyed the fact that we had the rest of the day off after the Ascension day service. I wouldn't lie about my beliefs to get my kids into a church school, but I wouldn't worry about sending them there if I could & the education was Ok otherwise - I'd have more faith in my own influence in bringing them up with an open mind than in the schools ability to indoctrinate them.