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Originally posted by pony_trekker
Probably the wrong board. What level of religious involvement does a Catholic High School have? Let's say one's child was born Catholic but never formally baptised or confirmed because of religious indiference. Would a Catholic high school (which the kid wants to attend for other reasons -- athletics -- be inappropriate?
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It will surprise no one that I have extensive thoughts on the subject. For reasons that are outable, I have a bit of experience on this subject, too. PM me if you care to hear any background for caveat purposes.
Anyone who says "it varies" is right. With regard to religious tolerance, a Jesuit high school is about a 9 (on a scale of 1 to 10) and an Opus Dei school would be a zero. So the threshold question is not whether your kid will be made to be a Catholic, but whether you want to send your kid to a school that has the temerity to believe that values can and should be taught by people in addition to parents, and then to decide whether the overall values that the school seeks to inculcate are consistent with (note: not necessarily the same as) your own. If you're constantly going to be pissed off that your kid's education will have at least a moral, if not explicitly religious, component at its core, stay away. Even the most hippy-dippy religiously tolerant HS will make value statements like "become the evidence of Christ in the world" and other shit that spooks the atheists.
High school is a time when kids seek out things that piss off their parents; can you live with the possibility that your kid asks to get baptized or confirmed or go on voluntary religious retreats when you think God is total bullshit? Are you prepared to send your kid to a school where, if he gets caught with drugs, he can and probably will get expelled without much handwringing by the school's administration? Will you entrust your kid into a value system that will not rigidly track your own personal priorities, for the sake that your kid will come out the other end with a sense of coherence and shared community values, even if these are not entirely your own?*
All the things that make Catholic education attractive to some parents make it anathema to others, including the thought that kids will be taught that their parents aren't necessarily the final authority here on Earth, much less in the afterlife (if any).
I attended Catholic school K-12, BTW. I am not presently a practicing Catholic, but I attend church with my family in another denomination. My school was infamously liberal, so YMMV.
*The idea that one's adolescence is a time for rebellion against everthing is kinda a crock of shit. It's a time for rebellion against
your parents; teens are actually the world's most skillful followers. The benefit of religious education of any creed is the sneaky way in which it capitalizes on the "I'm a vulnerable sheep who does what the cool kids do" stage of adolescence by making it possible for your kid to latch on to a kind of Groupthink that is (in most people's view, at least) essentially harmless, or at least far less harmful than what might be available in an unregulated marketplace of ideas. Bad example of this would be a Pakistani madrassa; good example of this is Notre Dame football. Either way, the effects are pretty permanent, like imprinting baby ducks.
