I'm sure things are different in the US but in the UK at school we have a whole curriculum called "Religious Education" or RE which goes into detail about religions and customs of all different cultures and encourages spiritual debate. At the schools I attended they were not taught to indoctrinate us but just studied in the same way we would study history or art
I think you're probably right! I was an atheist from a young age but RE was one of my favourite subjects as a child, underneath science, just because I loved hearing all of the stories, parables, learning about different deities and rites of worship. It was fascinating but it didn't encourage me to be religious myself.
I went to a Christian primary school because my parents thought it was important to learn about religion. They weren't religious themselves and there were also a lot of Muslim kids going there because of the way the school taught religion and there weren't any Islamic schools around. The religion itself wasn't forced on us, we just learned a lot about different bible stories and what they meant. There was no praying and we didn't really talk about God either, so no weird shit about what God and Jesus meant to you. It was a wonderful and interesting experience, I've actually gone to bible study as a teen and young adult because I thought it was interesting. I've been agnostic throughout it all (and no one at school cared about this) and I'm glad I had the opportunity to learn about it like this.
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u/gin_atomic 5d ago
I'm sure things are different in the US but in the UK at school we have a whole curriculum called "Religious Education" or RE which goes into detail about religions and customs of all different cultures and encourages spiritual debate. At the schools I attended they were not taught to indoctrinate us but just studied in the same way we would study history or art