atheism

It's probably been 10 or 12 years since I posted on this subreddit but this has been on my mind a lot.

Religion has NO place in an educational setting. Ever. I feel like people defend private religious education because they can choose their own curriculum, or because it's the parents "right" to teach their children a religious curriculum, whatever. It has NO PLACE in schools. Ever.

I went to a private Christian school from preK to high school graduation. So many of my classmates were sexually abused by the faculty. I remember in primary school, one of my teachers would constantly tell us that if we didn't behave, we would burn in hell, as a method of classroom control. Due to fear based sexual education, I left high school with a condition called vaginismus wherein I was so scared of penetration of any kind that my pelvic floor would constantly contract to the point I could not even physically insert a tampon. One teacher would lock misbehaving children in a closet and tell them to "pray for forgiveness" for a while. I literally just remember bawling my eyes out every time. This doesn't even mention all the cruddy science I learned. We did not learn about evolution, or the big bang, or even dinosaurs. I had multiple teachers tell us that dinosaurs were never real. Another one said that dinosaurs were actually the size of sheep and humans ate them all. Of course, climate change was not real to the entire staff so absolutely no environmentalism was instilled in any child there. Among a lot of other things I had to unlearn. When one of my classmates died when I was ten due to a car wreck, the teacher told us that he probably went to hell because he hadn't been baptized yet, to make a point the rest of us should get baptized. This list is so scrambled with no order, but I really could just go on and on about the things I witnessed and went through there.

Anyway, I had shared all this with an ex boyfriend of mine about 12 years ago. All the trauma I had seen and all the pieces I had to pick up as an adult from the experience. He was never highly religious but he did say he believed in God and left it at that.

Anyway, I look on social media today and he has shared a picture of his 8 year old son's school picture. And I recognize the logo on the kids shirt immediately. He goes to the same private Christian school that I CRIED TO HIM about the abuse I endured and how much mental trauma I had to sift through as an adult to figure out what was real and what was manipulation.

Apparently, none of those conversations mattered, and he's paid this school tens of thousands in tuition, and marched him off to relive the same or similar abuses I went through.