Hi MissCris,
Great topic, as always!
I'm sorry I'm a little late to the party, but I just had to step in and play devil's advocate.
First of all, I've read the posts that say Christians should only send their kids to Christian schools, and I understand why people are saying that, but I'm not sure if some people understand that this might not be possible for a lot of parents.
I went to Lutheran schools K-12th grade, and although my parents were willing to make whatever sacrifices they had to in order to send their kids to Christian schools, most parents would probably want to save the money for their kids' college expenses instead. I think that back "in my day", yearly tuition was around $2500.
I just looked up my old high schools current tuition rates, and it's $5,900 to $6,500 per child, per year. (There is a small discount if you have more than one child in school at a time.)
There was a good reason why my entire high school had only 124 students at the time I attended. Even back then, not many people could, or were willing, to pony up that kind of money just for high school.
One reason why it's so expensive is because the school does not accept money from the government, any other institutions, or public fundraising, so that there are no outside influences on the curriculum. Most of the other Christian schools in the area would accept money from whoever was willing to dish it out.
The other problem was that my high school's curriculum was terribly behind the times because we just didn't have the money for anything modern, and the emphasis was on preparing students to become a Lutheran pastor or teacher. Anyone realizes how useful it would have been to study a language like Spanish, but my school only offered Greek and German. Would you want your child to be able to study computer science? Well, you couldn't have learned anything about that from my high school. We barely had the money to learn basic typing, let alone anything that a computer could actually do.
My younger siblings eventually opted to go to public schools because there were simply more opportunities, and have found successes and opportunities they most likely would have never had if they had not gone to public schools.
I also understand that public schools teach a wide array of things about sex that Christian parents would not want their kids to be exposed to.
But I'm not sure how much better the alternative is either, which, in my case at least, was complete and total silence.
NOTHING about anatomy or sex education was ever whispered about, let alone spoken, by teachers in my schools. I have written this several times on CC, but the general attitude at my school was, "Don't talk about it. Don't think about it. And for heaven's sake, don't ASK us anything about it!"
Girls who accidentally became pregnant in my high school disappeared, because they were asked not to come back. Advertising yourself as a Christian school, and then having pregnant, unmarried young girls walking down the halls--simply put--was bad for business.
Although I am extremely grateful for the sacrifices my parents made to send me to Christian schools, I can tell anyone up front that these experiences left me with a a very bitter aftertaste when it came to the notion of a "Christian education."
I praise God for the Scriptural foundation it gave me.
But I don't agree at all with being taught the creed of "God's great love, mercy, and forgiveness" every single day--and then watching as people whose sins were just more visible than others were being erased, as if they no longer existed.