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Comment by knewter | Hacker News Reader

Homeschool your kids. No one else cares about them

In my area of the forgotten flyover country, the options are:

1) Public school for free for middle-of-the-road (in our district) results, and be at the mercy of school-board politics,

2) Do Catholic school, and we agree with the religious particulars of the Catholic school near us, but it's expensive and they may be weak in STEM and global social studies,

3) Join a home-school co-op, and use the flexibility and extra time to get it all right and fill in any gaps.

I don't know what the right answer is, but 3 is looking increasingly good.

Are US Catholic schools really that religious?

I went to a Catholic school in Ireland and religion had a very minor role in day to day activities or the curriculum.

Any religious activities that did occur were entirely optional; nobody cared if you participated or not.

They're really called Catholic schools because they used to be run by people from religious orders, but they're all dead now and have been replaced by lay people.

I realize my experience is a small sample, but in the early 2000s all the nuns were gone but we still adhered to what would be considered pretty-left but still orthodox today,

Ireland does have a very different relationship with the Catholic faith than the US does, especially over the last couple of decades.

I can't blame them. They've had their trust violated at every possible moment. I do not envy a priest assigned there.

I was homeschooled for 1.5 years, and while there were aspects of it I really enjoyed, it is absolutely rife with religious fundamentalists. My biology book used the "how many monkeys would it take to write the Bible randomly" as an argument for intelligent design. My mother didn't vet the books well because she was getting help from a Christian friend of hers.

Unfortunately, looking from the outside in, the teachers care but the administrators do not. While I would still consider public school, I think supplementing and supervising their assignments is the minimum a parent can do. Homeschool just isn't feasible for many people, and there is a reason teachers specialize in topics past grade 5.

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