Originally Posted by quasievilgenius

Speaking as the child of two career educators:

That's not high primary education works. The ENTIRE primary school system in America is based solely on test scores...which I how I made it through 12 years of education without doing any homework that I wasn't literally FORCED to do and still managed to pass even though half the time my class averages were in the 30s all year long. If you can pass the End of Course test, you pass the class.

Up until college, education is PRECISELY about recitation of lecture material with a small portion being concerned with critical thinking and logical analysis of information. You'll notice, state-mandated end of course tests are almost unanimously multiple choice tests, which require ONLY that you remember and be able to recite key pieces of information. Schools are REQUIRED to teach specific curricula (i.e. 10th grade is world history, 11th grade is American history.) Students are generally required (and this may vary from state to state, as state Board of Educations mandate most of these requirements) to take a certain number of required courses (x maths, x englishes, chemistry, biology and physical science) based on general federal requirements, further state requirements, and then (if a school has these options available) based on academic/vocational track. If you intend to go to college for, say, computer science, you will probably be required to take more maths than if you intend to go for, say, journalism, though the latter may mean you take an extra english class or something to that effect)

And you can't really teach a general idea of what religions believe and expect from their followers without getting into their denominations. If you do this with Christianity, for example...if you approach Christianity from the Catholic model, you are excluding all other Christian denominations from your course of study because most of the other denominations do not share the same views of Mary or the Saints, nor practical application of worship and congregation. Catholicism is the only denomination that expects its followers to actively confess all their sins to members of the clergy. As best as I can gather, Baptists don't pray to Saint Anthony when they lose something, or to Saint Christopher when they're about to take a trip. That's a Catholic thing. But if you approach Christianity from one of the Protestant models, then you are equally excluding Catholicism from your course material. Now, it's true that Christianity suffers the most trouble with this...

But the true points are still being overlooked:

number 1: there isn't enough TIME in 5th or 6th grade education to try and involve religion. In the earlier years of education, the curriculum IS exact, and there's JUST enough time to cover EXACTLY what has to be covered, sometimes not even that.

number 2: the sheer VOLUME of data that you're proposing to half-give kids is more dangerous than telling them nothing at all. If you really expect that kids are going to sit through a class in fifth or sixth grade and then decide four years later to start taking other religion classes (both of which are still technically in violation of separation of church and state unless you teach ALL of them equally) when they could easily be taking some other class that they don't really care about but will net them an easy A and let them spend time with their friends/that cute boy/girl/whatever, then you're not taking a realistic approach to dealing with children/adolescents. Just because you might take an active interest in the religions of the world (which I highly recommend you do) doesn't mean that others are going to.

And just remember: there is NOTHING more dangerous than a person with a little bit of information.