Advice for child with RE exemption

smacl

heldel00 wrote: »

How often are RE classes in second level? Hardly every day are they?

Don't know how typical it is, but in my daughter's school a couple of classes a week and the occasion full day lost to a retreat of some kind or other. In leaving cert year for a student doing a lot of honours subjects (one extra-curricular) that can amount to a lot of wasted time. She treats it as an easy class and does homework if under pressure, but IMHO it is not a good use of her time. To give some context, the teachers in a number of those subjects are also struggling (and failing in one case) to get through all the material on the curriculum.

lazygal

One RE class a week is still a waste of time. It can't do anything that a good school can't do otherwise. Religion free children manage to have empathy and social skills, and not just because of some made up creature watching over you.

MrPudding

lazygal wrote: »

One RE class a week is still a waste of time. It can't do anything that a good school can't do otherwise. Religion free children manage to have empathy and social skills, and not just because of some made up creature watching over you.

Precisely. I have four kids, all brought up without religion, and whilst i am obviously a little biased, they really are great kids.

They have empathy, and social skills, and manners, and everything you want a decent human being to have. And they have those things because we have taught them that this is how decent people behave, and we have managed to do this without threats or promises of imaginary places where they will go after their death, or the idea of a creepy, narcissistic, needy, psychopathic, imaginary supernatural being watching everything they do.

MrP

Hotblack Desiato

Samaris wrote: »

Religion as I was taught it was rather a waste of time, but it seems unreasonable to be having such a go at RE teachers, Mr. Pudding.

Doesn't seem at all unreasonable to me.

Bad enough that they're stealing a living off the taxpayer teaching nonsense, worse that what they're teaching is sectarian and damaging.

smacl

Hotblack Desiato wrote: »

Doesn't seem at all unreasonable to me.

Bad enough that they're stealing a living off the taxpayer teaching nonsense, worse that what they're teaching is sectarian and damaging.

Problem is though, it is going to be extremely difficult to get gainful employment as a teacher in this country if you're openly atheist and refuse to teach religion. The problem IMHO is entirely with the cosy and largely covert relationship between the main churches in this country and the state. The individual teacher is very poorly placed to oppose this.

Stallingrad

Our child has three RE classes a week, so the guts of 3 hours wasted when she could be doing something more productive than reading, which she does every night anyway.

MrPudding

smacl wrote: »

Problem is though, it is going to be extremely difficult to get gainful employment as a teacher in this country if you're openly atheist and refuse to teach religion. The problem IMHO is entirely with the cosy and largely covert relationship between the main churches in this country and the state. The individual teacher is very poorly placed to oppose this.

And that is exactly the problem that needs to be fixed.

MrP

splinter65

MrPudding wrote: »

Well, they can have it, so long as they stop whining when children with sensible parents, who have withdrawn them from the nonsense subject, are doing homework instead of being taught nonsense.

MrP

It’s quite likely that most of the parents who sent their children to a Catholic school are quite happy for them to be taught “religion” .
The poster I replied to didn’t seem to understand that, and neither do you.
Why involve these children in a protest about something that’s not affecting them?

MrPudding

splinter65 wrote: »

It’s quite likely that most of the parents who sent their children to a Catholic school are quite happy for them to be taught “religion” .
The poster I replied to didn’t seem to understand that, and neither do you.
Why involve these children in a protest about something that’s not affecting them?

And I do understand that some parents want their children taught nonsense. As you might have guessed, I think it is worthless and they are doing their children a disservice, but I do understand they are happy for them to be taught it.

I am not involving those children. There have been a few stories recently where children who have an exemption from being taught nonsense have been prevented from doping school work/homework during their exempt time. One of the reasons given is that parents that want their child to be taught nonsense (or don't care if they are) complain when the exempt children do something productive. Presumably because they think that it gives the exempt child some advantage (presumably some advantage in addition to the fact that they are not being taught nonsense). And that was my point.

By all means, if you want your child to be taught nonsense during the school day, when they could be learning something actually useful, knock yourself out, but don't then try to prevent other children from doing something worthwhile in that otherwise wasted time.

MrP