CHOOSING THE FIELD OF BATTLE received the kindness of a link at this post. The author tends to come across as ambivalent and noncommital. He is not. I seriously doubt any blogger is either ambivalent and noncommital in his heart, and this one is an Atheist who use to be a Christian. Nevertheless, he only sort of favors school choice, and not for religious reasons.
What I think the author of “Education Does Matter” misses is the motivational aspects of belief. In the comments the author offers this observation.
“That point you make about parents caring about the education their kids receive is a very important one. Quality parenting on that front seems to be a decisive indicator on whether a child will learn at all, let alone in what surrounding.”
To accomplish anything in this world, we must have the tools we need, and a good education provides those tools. Parents pass on their beliefs to their children, and those too are tools, tools of a higher sort. In addition to instructing us in how to do things, a good education tells us what we should try to accomplish and why. Those are the tools provided by a good religious education, and that is why no education is complete without religious instruction.
Citizen Tom 
Thank you kindly for the reblog!
The motivational aspects of belief can either be inspiring or demoralizing, depending upon one’s point of view. Since this post was grounded in information I could find, I limited its scope to that information. School choice, I think, is crucial to liberty, as well as making the government work for the people instead of working over the people.
I am interested in this assertion you made:
“In addition to instructing us in how to do things, a good education tells us what we should try to accomplish and why. Those are the tools provided by a good religious education, and that is why no education is complete without religious instruction.”
What tools can a good religious education provide that are superior to a good secular education? I will assume that by “religious” you mean Christian. By “secular,” I mean an education that does not include instruction that relies on the belief in the existence of a deity or deities.
Sounds like you have suggested a good topic for a post. I will try to put something together this weekend.
In the meantime, please consider this post => https://citizentom.com/2014/12/28/is-multiculturalism-a-religion/.
What we call a secular education is effectively a religious education. When power hungry politicians get in charge of the education of children, we have to be quite naive to assume they will put the children’s interests before their own.
“What we call a secular education is effectively a religious education.”
This is really true. We pulled all four of our kids out of public school and homeschooled them all at some point, not really for religious reasons at all, but because of the kind of secular indoctrination that was going on. The secular “deity” that Sirius doesn’t quite recognize, is the the school system itself, backed up by government power, that quickly begins to undermine parental authority. So suddenly kids are not really being encouraged to learn, they’re learning how to parrot back what is perceived as politically correct. This gets to be a real problem if you have kids that like to think for themselves. We have a lot of drop outs and behavior problems in public school and what many of those kids are resisting is simply secular “religious” indoctrination.
Had not thought of it that way, but it makes sense.
Your last post, https://insanitybytes2.wordpress.com/2015/01/08/love-letters-for-no-reason/, causes me to think of that feminism “ism.” The effort to feminize boys to make the feminists happy is certainly messing lots of boys up. Of course, confusing the boys confuses the girls too. Adding that sort of sexual confusion would all by itself make school a horrid place for an already confused bunch of teenagers.