Quote Originally Posted by rockzmom
Interesting! Now did you attend a public school or private school?

As my girls attend public school, religion can't be taught and that is also why parents can opt their kids out of the program. As that class also covers birth control and as that is a religious choice, parents have the right to pull them out. There was a BIG battle here in our county over a video that showed the children how to correctly place a ummm protective device shall I say on a certain part of the male. Their was NO actual male parts being shown! Yet the idea of kids being informed that they had choices INSTEAD of abstinence was the problem.

Also the issue of teaching that "families" can be made up of not just a male and a female as in "Why does Susie have two moms?" was a hot topic in that curriculum.

Just to check if I understand the difference correctly: public schools in the US are government-funded and private schools aren't, right? Can private schools choose what they want to teach or do they still have to adhere to a set curriculum to which they can add stuff?

So religion is never taught in public schools? Is sex-ed a subject on itself or is it part of biology class? Students don't have to take exams about the subject matter? Can't the school argue that birth control is related to biology? I mean, they could teach the kids what it is and the effect it has on the body (I'm talking about the pill of course) and remain neutral about using or not using it. That way the students know what it is, what it does and they can choose for themselves.


In Belgium, we have two main types of schools (I'll talk about the exceptions later). We do have the governement-funded schools and than there are Catholic schools. But the Catholic schools are still partly government-funded.

So back to the two main types of schools. In Catholic schools, obviously, religion is taught. Children in Belgium go to Catholic schools not because they (or their parents) are very religious, but mostly because those schools are sometimes considered better than the government-funded schools. I went to Catholic schools all my life (except for college) and there were also for example Muslim students. We praid in class (depended on the teacher) and went to mass once a month (in primary school), there was a cross in every classroom and of course religion was taught. But not in a "Christianity and Catholicism is the only way and believing in evolution is a sin"-kind of way. In primary school we learned mostly about Christianity. In high school we learned also about other world religions, and more about how we could be better persons and about a healthy approach to relationships (as I said). So sometimes it was more like an ethics course. Despite being a Catholic school, we were never told homosexuality is wrong or that we shouldn't use birth control.

Now the government-funded schools offer a choice to students as to what kind of class they want to attend. They sometimes offer religion (Christianity, Islam) and than there is a sort of ethics course. There is a word for it in Dutch but I wouldn't know how to translate it. I never had the class but I would guess it basically is the kind of class we had in high school about ethics and how we can all live together.

Now for the exceptions which I don't think are government-funded. There are schools like Steiner and Freinet. Than there are jewish (Chassidic) schools. I recently heard about a school for Protestant pupils. Unlike the Catholic schools, they are very focused on religion. They also only teach creationism. And there have been talks about opening a school for Muslims. In the beginning of the school year there was a heated debate about Muslim girls wearing the hijab to school so all of a sudden imams were talking about opening schools just for Muslim girls where they could wear the hijab.