Agnostic/Atheist Home Ed Facebook groups?

[tinfoilhat]

One of the many reasons we chose to HE was because we weren't happy with the indoctrination of children by means of morning assemblies, RE classes etc at such a young age.

We're over a year into our HE journey and I've been really surprised by how many religious families there are in the HE community. I've never met so many in my life! It's been a total culture shock for me and I'm not comfortable with it. I'd love to know if there are any Atheist/Agnostic Home-ed Facebook groups we could join, if anyone knows of any?I'd like to find out about curriculums that aren't 'Christian' based and I don't want to offend anyone on the usual groups by asking this. If would also be nice to be amongst like-minded people!
Athuest/Agnostic

Sorry, last couple of words were a typo i couldn't get rid of, bloody phone!

Meant to add, thank you for any help you can give!

That's really interesting! It's not the case at all where we are. There it's the evangelical Christian home educators who pretty much socialise independently from everyone else (and there are plenty and plenty of everyone else, including the firmly Muslim home educators, who are much more comfortable mucking in with the hippy types and special needs families and so on!).

Look up "A Little Bit of Structure" - I think it's a forum or a yahoo group, and it's for home edders who do structured stuff of one kind or another. As far as I know it has no particularly religious focus

I too have found few HE families who say that religion was a major factor in their decision to home educate. They tend to associate sometimes with the wider HE community, especially for group outings, but spend much of their time with like-minded families. Maybe you live in a particularly religious area and I don't, tinfoilhat? Dunno. But I can see why you would want to find people whose beliefs are similar to yours and it is well worth the effort.

By the way, a useful keyword which you might want to use when you are looking for curricula which don't have a strong religious underpinning is "secular" rather than atheist or agnostic. It sounds like you aren't looking for an atheist or agnostic curriculum as such, but for one which doesn't have ANY religious values attached to it. I can't imagine anyone would be offended by you simply asking about such curricula on any home ed list, so long as you don't criticise what they are doing. Anyway, strongly religious families sometimes do use a secular curriculum for some subjects. There are many ways to approach religious instruction.

Thank you for your advice. Yes, secular is definitely a better word to use and i shall try that.
The families i know haven't been 'in your face' about it, only a mention in passing that they're at church on a Sunday for example, but their fb pages are often littered with bible quotes. I have been careful in front of them
not to be my usual self when it comes to anything remotely religious, as my views are quite strongly against organised religion. It's just totally new ground for me to be around people who have a strong faith, it's always been quite the opposite. I was completely shocked the other day to hear a 9yr old boy, who was listening to a conversation between two others boys about dinosaurs, meteors etc, turn round and say "but that's not true, God created the earth and everything in it in seven days." In my naivity, i just didn't think people still believed this stuff and it made me really uncomfortable, it's been playing on my mind since. And as i said, as soon as I read about a curriculum being 'Christian based' it just turns me off it completely.

I will try your suggestions, thank you very much.

I'm amazed that you think most schools will try and religiously indoctrinate the kids. Unless it's a church school or religiously affiliated in some way (muslim, jewish etc.), religion is taught primarily as a 'christians do this, jews do that, muslims do something else', and in primary schools is usually taught thematically - eg. 'festivals', 'food' with a look at what different religions do. Kids usually end up at secondary school with a total mishmash of misunderstanding of what the covered religions do, mixing up religious founders (Jesus is Hindu, isn't he Miss?). There are FAR more likely to be home-edders who have strong religious views and are home-edding because they think the schools don't go far enough in indoctrination! I personally can't see the problem with morning assemblies (they are nearly always now religiously non-specific because of the range of different faiths represented in schools) - and if your child believes in Father Christmas or the Tooth Fairy, then there's no problem in believing in 'God' - with your input they'll soon grow out of all three anyway.

My guess is that those Christian families do have their times of Christian instruction together etc. but most things would be delighted to be part of something bigger than themselves, if you gave them the chance.

but IN most things, sorry.