Public Schooling

Have you ever thought about what you learned in high school, and whether or not it was a good idea for them to teach you that?

I mean, sure, we all complained about math because we're never going to use this in real life. Honestly, though, learning math is important for everyone in their younger days because it grows brain synapses that strengthen your problem solving abilities whether the problem is math or shopping.

I'm talking about morally. Is there anything you were taught that you morally object to being taught?
I feel like there was for me. There was one book we read my junior year of high school called Native Son, and the teacher read in class the part that was removed from the edited version. Basically, it was a scene where two boys masturbated in a movie theatre. Classy, right?

Now, this didn't seriously offend my sensibilities at the time, but now that I'm within 5 or 6 years of parenthood, I worry.

The other thing, aside from moral problems with education material, is the image that a public school portrays of religion, a thought which is encouraged by the state and national governments. When I was in that same class, with many very controversial books, we also read the sermon "Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God" by Jonathan Edwards. This is certainly a very colorful piece, but on the whole it is almost entirely irrelevant to both American history and its literature. It was also the ONLY religious material I recall reading during all of high school.

For the uninformed, Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God is not a happy sermon, or one about love, but Edwards' primary sermon about the unstoppable wrath and judgment of God.

Now, if this is the only exposure allowed by public schools to Christianity for high school kids to learn from academically, there is no point in using this sermon except to portray Christianity as a group of fundamentalist nutjobs. That sermon is not for a group of people who have not accepted the beauty of the Gospel first.

From a literary standpoint, there are HUNDREDS of other famous sermons they could have used!
John Wesley wrote 120+ sermons of which exact copies exist online! St. Augustine wrote Christian philosophy, which is easily reconcilable with modern American education!
But, no, the public school system prefers what is "interesting" and ridiculous over that which is educational.

Homeschooling, here I come.