Separation of Church and School

I was talking to a blow-hard recently about kids and schooling. He has some young kids he's planning to enroll in Catholic school. His reasoning was, "It's too confusing for kids to get the different messages from home and school. I don't want my kids being told these contradictory things, and having to go to their teacher with, 'but mommy and daddy say this,' or 'my priest says this.' " I felt a sudden, quick, burst of sympathy for teachers who might be faced with such children. If I was a teacher, my blunt reaction would be, 'So what? I don't care what your priest says, this is how it really is.' It's not that I'm anti-religion. I just think that a lot of it is parables and poetry, and I don't have patience with people trying to substitute it for reality.

The blow-hard's other complaint about public schools was that science class never goes into the morality of certain issues. I guess he means sex ed doesn't tell the kids that premarital sex is sinful, or gay people are evil. I suggested that there was no moral consensus across cultures and that morality wasn't a scientific judgment anyway, so that was why schools didn't go into it. But I think my words fell on deaf ears. I know some people do emerge from the private school system with intact logic and reasoning, and a few even go on to become scientists. One of the smartest guys I know attended Catholic school. But I feel like a school that could mix morality with science (in fact, that deliberately planned curricula to do so) would stack the deck against its students. Oh well. If this guy wants to spend the money to send his kids to private school, I guess there's nothing I can do to convince him otherwise. I just feel a little that the kids aren't getting a fair deal.