Anyone ever went to a public school that was actually mostly secular?
I do wonder if there's a regression taking place in some public schools, but its hard to gauge because I can't still attend classes at my old high school so I don't know if things are still similar to when I went there or are radically different.
My public school years start around 1983-84 to graduation in high school in 1996. In that time I went to 3 public schools(Elementary-Middle-High) and one Catholic school for grade 7 and 8. Explanation for the Catholic school being that my mother pulled me out of the public middle school because, after getting beaten up at school again, she was told by the Principal that "boys will be boys". She cussed him out and pulled me out.
Anyways, enough biography, just wanted to give a summary of experiences I had, granted these are anecdotal, but I'm wondering if they are rare. Obviously the Catholic school did what catholic schools do, they actually had morning prayer, mass on certain days, said the pledge every morning and religion classes.
OK, so onto practices at the public schools in my school district, they are all in the same district, and indeed are right next to each other, which made things convenient. I'm rolling the pledge in here because I find the experiences to be different from other schools around us. At my school district, we stopped saying the pledge in public school by the time I was in Middle School. In grade 6, never said the pledge in the morning, in fact, when I switched to the Catholic School, after a year of not saying the pledge, it felt weird to say it again.
On the holidays, the schools all went all out, Halloween we were allowed to dress up, I remember dressing as Freddie Krueger, big head covered mask and plastic glove, it was hot, it stank of latex and it was fun. I was, of course, part of the choir in elementary school and during Christmas, we would sing songs like Frosty the Snowman and Rudolph the Red-Nose reindeer. We could have sung some religious songs but I don't remember if we did or not, and the videos, which my Dad recently digitized, don't show them.
As far as prayer or anything, no recollection from elementary school through high school, I do remember that some of the athletes in high school were part of some Christian athletics association or something, but I only knew that from the flyers they had on their lockers. The closest to prayer we ever had was in high school, one time, one of our principals announced a moment of silence because one of our classmates died in a car crash, with two of his friends being hospitalized, but that's it. People prayed in the lunch room, we had an exchange student from India who had to bring in his lunch because, well hell, the only thing with no beef in it in school was the salad, and that sucked.
We were taught evolution since at least Middle School, and I will say this instruction didn't change from the Public to Catholic schools, there were no disclaimers, no "discussion of controversies", etc. It was just science.
There was one interesting little issue though, I believe it was Junior year, may have been for our world history class, but anyways, they called away from class with our teacher to go to the auditorium for religious instruction, which involved a Hindu priest or something giving us a brief summary of the world religions for an hour. If he preached anything it was universalism, or "many paths", trying to be non-offensive, I guess. Don't remember any complaints or controversy over that. Also, just a note, where I lived was 99% white, majority Christian and mostly conservative. Most of its population growth was from White Flight, and generally is still a very racist and conservative. But for some reason, you couldn't tell that from the high school I went to, which is odd. I guess this is what much of the Midwest is like.
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. He was popular with us students because he had a sense of humor. Also, if I remember right, he was an atheist, I think someone in the philosophy club asked him if he believed in god and he said no.
